


The Heart of the Storm

by withthebreezesblown



Series: The Tempest Inside [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Flawed characters, I've referred to this as the fic, Sequel, and not always suceeding, and that really kind of sums this up, trying to be good people, where I drag my characters by their hair through the mud to their happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-01 02:50:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 58,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6497899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthebreezesblown/pseuds/withthebreezesblown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4840649/chapters/11087651">The Tempest Inside</a>.</p><p>Solona Amell thought she knew exactly what she would have left when she paid the price named for making the world a better place. But it's less, and it's more, and what can a girl who thinks she knows everything about sacrifice still have to learn about what's left when everything else is gone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Into the World's Tempestuous Night

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel. You can, of course, do whatever you want, and I am flattered when anyone bothers to read anything I write, but I would recommend reading [The Tempest Inside](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4840649/chapters/11087651) first. It contains absolutely all of the context for this story.
> 
> If you _have_ already read _The Tempest Inside_ , then you're wonderful, and thank you.

It’s raining. Of course it’s raining. The young woman riding through it doesn’t mind though. She tilts her face up to it, letting it rinse away any proof that riding out through Denerim’s city gates alone, without the person who was once the brightest and best thing in her world, had caused tears to stream down her cheeks. Because the Warden-Commander of Ferelden does not cry. She had tried to convince herself once that Solona Amell didn’t cry either. It hadn’t ever quite been true. But the Warden-Commander—she definitely does _not_ cry. She also doesn’t try to take shelter from the rain; why bother? If she were to, she might never make it to Amaranthine at all, because now that it’s started, the Maker only knows when it will stop. Despite a handful of lessons at the Palace, she’s not entirely comfortable on the horse—on the whole, she’s much more fond of standing in front of Eluvia, feeding her carrots while the horse snuffles her hair. She knows the beast’s affectionate nature is no coincidence—she imagines Alistair trying awkwardly to explain that he’s looking for a horse for a girl who likes to be nuzzled.

No. Not Alistair. She said goodbye to Alistair. He’s gone now. From now on, for Solona, there’s just the King.

Despite Eluvia’s gentle nature, she still isn’t comfortable in the saddle, so she rides slowly, mind half occupied with another day that she let the rain soak her through. Muffin keeps running ahead and then giving her a disappointed look when he returns, displeased that, from way up there, she can’t walk with her fingers resting on his head.

It isn’t until night falls suddenly, with little indication that it’s coming in the purple-grey shadows cast by the rain clouds, that she realizes the mistake she’s made in refusing the retinue of soldiers meant to accompany her to Amaranthine. They’d already been waiting for her in the early dawn light when she arrived at the stables with all of her packs hanging off of her—so much more than she carried with her during the Blight, and most of it _his_  generosity. She has every gift he gave her, and though the most precious—the heaviest—is a stack of papers that weighs next to nothing, they are every one of them dear to her, but she had already decided then that she would accept no more. Perhaps if there had been only one or two soldiers, she could have been prevailed upon. But fifteen men and women all wearing the colors and insignia marking them as the elite of the Royal Guard, those charged with protecting the King himself? She thinks that there could not be more than another two or three members of this inner circle of guardsmen—had she allowed them to accompany her, it would have been at the expense of the King’s own protection. It had been—as was his way—entirely too much.

Convincing the Captain to disregard his King’s direct orders was an ordeal of its own. She’d had to resort to threats: “I am a Warden-Commander. I am on Warden business. It is no concern of the King of Ferelden, and certainly no concern of the Captain of His Guard. You will _stand down_ from your presumption to interfere in my duties or risk causing a political war between the Wardens and Ferelden. _You_ may not yet be familiar with your King, but I assure you _I_ am, and he will not be pleased with this morning’s events if it comes to that. So return to your _other_ duties and leave me be.” Maker help her, it had not been a lie. He will be furious when he finds out what she’s done. She feels a twinge of guilt now for the poor Captain who had so uncertainly agreed. He looked like a man who understood quite well that he was between a rock and a hard place. She can only guess that the real reason he relented was because, given the choice between _her_ displeasure and the King’s, he found the King’s to be the lesser threat.

Now, as she lies in her tent (little good that it does—the ground is soaked; she is soaked) she thinks perhaps it would have been wise to bring at least one or two soldiers to accompany her. There are still darkspawn swarming the countryside—more than once she’s felt their presence. Strangely, they have not sought her out. It disconcerts her. She wonders what can distract a darkspawn. In the bright light and early morning bustle of the stable, this had not seemed like such a great thing. She has killed darkspawn by what must now be the _thousands_ , she thinks. But now that she’s made camp (she snorts to herself at the word—camp is a place with a crackling fire and the voices of her friends and warm arms wrapped around her; _this_ is not camp), the idea of being crept up upon by darkspawn during the night is something else entirely. She whispers quietly to Muffin, who is pressed close to her wet, shivering body. “You take the first watch. No falling asleep. If something eats me, who will feed you biscuits? And don’t forget to wake me later so you can sleep too.”

 

 

By the second day, the rain has not relented for a moment. Instead, the winds have picked up. Her muscles actually _ache_ from all the shivering. She uses a warming spell from time to time, but she’s hesitant to waste mana when at any moment she might have to fight any number of darkspawn. She does have to deal with them—twice. The first time, she senses a large mass ahead and a smaller cluster in the only other viable direction. As slowly as she’s already traveling, she’s determined not to backtrack, so she chooses the smaller cluster. Between her and Muffin, it’s nothing they can’t handle. After, she kneels in front of him, rubbing his ears and kissing his head. “As though a few paltry darkspawn are any match for a slayer of archdemons and her fearsome canine companion.”

She is impressed by Eluvia. Tense, anxious, the horse had balked but not bolted. In the second confrontation, she even contributes, kicking a genlock that had gone after her from behind in the head with such force that she leaves his skull partially caved in.

The second night is worse than the first. All she can think is that there are _whole days_ between her and Alistair. And one day there will be weeks, and months, and years.

She curls closer to her mabari. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get through this. I’ll laugh, and I’ll play with you, and I’ll look at the stars if they ever come back out. I’ll be okay. Just don’t leave, me okay? Because you’re all I have left. Just promise you won’t leave me.”

Putting one huge paw across her, Muffin leans closer to lick her face before butting his head against her and whining.

“Then it’s settled. I won’t wash away in the rain. I’ll stay here with you, and you’ll stay here with me, and it’ll be okay. You and I, we’ll both be fine.

She draws a deep breath, clinging to Muffin. Ug. Well, when she arrives at Vigil’s Keep she will smell _very, very Fereldan_. As if she needed help being unimpressive to the Orlesian Wardens who’ve been sent to her.

 

 

Thank the Maker for Mhairi, the recruit the Wardens have stationed outside Amaranthine to meet their Commander on the road. (What a terribly boring job. She hopes the girl hasn’t been waiting overly long.) She’s young—no older than herself, Solona thinks—and a little in awe (this both surprises and amuses Solona, though she thinks that if the girl knew the real truth, the whole of it, there’d be little enough to inspire awe), but she has a seriousness and a certainty about her that, once she realizes that everything has gone to shit, Solona suspects she will find herself counting on a great deal in the coming days. Because of course it’s all gone to shit. It’s consistent, at least. Solona Amell shows up somewhere, and everything disintegrates into, well, _shit_. It’s so consistent that she doesn’t think she’s really even surprised. 

She's not surprised until they round a corner, and she sees the man who’s standing there, a stream of fire pouring from his fingers until the darkspawn it’s aimed at falls crisply to the floor.

She cannot help the bemused smile that spreads over her face as her hands come to rest on her hips.

When the man realizes he has an audience, rather than turning to face them, he glances at the fallen templars all around him. He raises his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Er… I didn’t do it.”

And then he does turn towards her, and his face transforms. “Hey, I recognize you from the Circle!” The brightness of his smile dims only slightly as he glances again at the dead templars. “I know what they’ve been saying about me, but this?” He raises his eyebrows in a way he seems to think will come off as quite innocent and shakes his head. “Not my doing.”

She just sighs, a sound that she can’t quite keep her amusement out of—not that dead templars are _funny_ , but she truly doesn’t think he’s the one who’s done this. “Of all the Maker’s ill timed jokes. Oh, _Anders_.”

His smile triples. He kicks at the shoulder of the nearest prone templar. “Did you hear that, tin man? _The Hero of Ferelden_ _knows my name_.”

She rolls her eyes. “Come on; you’re helping me reclaim this damn keep. You’re on barriers. And keep the flames ready.”

He seems to consider this a moment before shrugging agreeably. “You know, you are a bossy woman. But not a templar. I can live with that compromise.”

As he falls in with them, he grins at Mhairi as well. “Is she bossy too? I could learn to like being told what to do.”

 

 

If the arrival of the Circle’s most notorious flirt, speaker of sedition, and escape artist is a pleasant surprise, she doesn’t even know what to call the moment when the dwarf taking on six hurlocks single-handedly tosses aside his blood spattered helmet and grins at her, one hand coming off his battleaxe to wave eagerly before he resumes hacking at the oncoming darkspawn. All she can think is, _Oh, Oghren!_

When Mhairi, annoyed, mutters, “He was here when I left. I can’t believe the Wardens didn’t kick him out,” her answer, with a smile bigger than she would have thought possible even _before_ she found out everything in this keep was in the process of being ripped apart, is only, “ _I_ can’t believe that anyone facing an outmatched number of darkspawn _wouldn’t_ want that crazy madman at their side.”

Because she hasn’t been spun in enough circles already, because she’s just not reeling hard enough, there is a _talking darkspawn_ on the roof. This terrifies her more than she lets on, far more than she’s willing to reveal to any of her companions, even Oghren. Because this is the one thing that’s supposed to be easy. The one choice that isn’t supposed to make her question who she is and what she can live with. Killing darkspawn. It’s supposed to be what she _does_. The one thing she doesn’t have to worry about paying for. And if _this_ , this last bastion of _easy,_ just got more complicated? Well, she just doesn’t think she can handle any more fucking complicated.

If nothing else, at least there's the fact that she hasn’t even thought about anything— _anyone_ —that the Warden-Commander has no reason to and is not allowed to think about since she found herself falling into this whole new heap of chaos. There are a thousand terrible things—all these dead and missing Wardens, men and women _she is responsible for_ , and there’s the idea that maybe if she knew how to ride better, if she’d gotten here faster, she could have _done something_ , and _now_ there are fucking _talking_ darkspawn—but there’s also sensible, dryly amusing Mhairi, and two men she never thought she’d see in the same place at her side, already making her unable to keep a smile from her face with their bickering, and maybe, just maybe, even though pretty much everything about her circumstances says this should probably be the most miserable experience of her life—just maybe it will be something else instead.


	2. In Agony, I Worked the Blade to Make It Deeper

On the roof, Anders is still healing a nick across the seneschal’s throat—a close call indeed—when movement on the road out past the gates catches Solona's attention. Hope rises up as she thinks that maybe it’s the missing Wardens. At a guess from what she can sense there _is_ at least _one_ among them. It isn’t until she and Muffin have hurried back down through the keep and are half running across the yard that she can make out anything clearly enough through the darkness and the rain for the hope to dash itself into dread.

Even though she’s close enough now to see the King’s expression—somewhere between anger and fear—as he slides from his horse to examine a dead genlock, he hasn’t noticed her yet. His eyes don’t land on her until Teagan steps close, head gesturing in her direction while one hands grips his arm, keeping him where he stands until he’s heard what the Bann has to say. And by now, Anders, Oghren, Mhairi, and the seneschal have caught up to her, leaving her with little choice what to do. She strides forward purposefully, eyes on nothing, and falls to one knee several feet away from the King. Muffin whines once beside her, and she thinks he’s asking permission for his usual greeting of trying to knock Alistair’s legs out from under him. She shushes him with a firmly enunciated, “ _Sit_.” The seneschal—the only other person who has grasped exactly who it is that’s come to visit—drops quickly beside them.

“It looks like I arrived a bit late. Too bad. I rather miss the whole darkspawn killing thing.” She can only describe his tone as false levity. She doesn’t know if it’s a good enough attempt to fool her companions, but it certainly hasn’t fooled _her_. He’s furious.

That’s when Mhairi catches on with an exclamation, taking a knee herself.

“I wanted to come and give the Wardens a formal welcome. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. What’s the situation?” The tone is still off, but perhaps he has learned a thing or two from Eamon in the last months, because it is, in all, a passable lie.

She’s grateful for it. The truth, she thinks, would make her look like a reckless child who has to be checked up on. She supposes the seneschal must know perfectly well that the King’s words aren’t quite honest—if this had been a planned visit, the man would have known about it well in advance.

As they rise, she lets the seneschal explain the situation. It allows her to avoid the glare she can _feel_ every time he so much as glances at her.

“I see. At least the Hero of Ferelden is still here, and alive. That’s something, right?”

Maker’s breath, but he’s angry, the sarcasm barely below the surface of his words.

When the Knight-Lieutenant steps forward with her warning about dangerous criminals, unlike the King, Solona understands right away, weight shifting on her feet towards Anders as she tries to put herself between him and the templar. Little good that it does. The woman doesn’t even seem to notice. “I will see you hanged for what you’ve done here murderer!”

“Murderer? But those templars were—oh, what’s the use? You won’t believe me anyhow.” The look of incredulous indignation on Anders’ face melts into resigned contempt.

The King is the only one who seems to understand what Solona’s half step in Anders’ direction means. “It seems there isn’t much to say. Unless… you have something to add, Commander?”

When she finally brings herself to glance at him, his jaw is tense and his lips are pressed into a thin, pale line, but he gives her a small nod, and she grasps immediately what it means. That he’ll back her up. That when it comes down to it, even angry as he is, he’ll take her side. Every time.

When her eyes move to the templar, she surprises herself with the feral grin that she cannot stop from spreading over her face. Even without a looking glass, she knows that it’s hard and arrogant. There’s nothing familiar about it, but as she glares at the Sword of Mercy across the woman’s chest, all she can think is, _You have no power over me_ , and her lips keep curling. “I do. I hereby conscript this mage into the Grey Wardens.”

The King practically cuts off the Knight-Lieutenant’s protestations before they’re done with an air of boredom. “I believe the Grey Wardens still retain the Right of Conscription, no? I will allow it.”

“If… if your Majesty feels it is best…” As the woman mutters her acquiescence, she doesn’t seem to know where to direct her suspicious glare with the most vehemence—at Anders or Solona.

And then Teagan is at the King’s side again, the two sharing some whispered argument before the King turns to the seneschal. “Well, it seems you have enough to be getting on with without playing host to the King of Ferelden. I’ll just have a word with the Commander, and I’ll take my leave.”

They don’t speak until they’re through the gates to the side yard, not only no longer audible to the others but no longer visible.

“So… perhaps you’d care to tell me what in the holy name of Andraste possessed you to think that traveling from Denerim to Amaranthine _by yourself_ in the _aftermath of a Blight_ , knowing that _darkspawn can sense you_ , was a reasonable thing to do?”

She fixes her gaze on a puddle, watching the surface ripple as raindrops hit it one after another. “I wasn’t by myself. I had Muffin. And Eluvia. And Knight-Enchanter Esmerelda. She’s the fiercest mage in Thedas, you know.” She tries to smile at him, but the anger in his face is mixing with something soft and sad now, and she has to look away again.

“That really does absolutely nothing to make me feel better about having to leave you here when you’re so determined to act stupidly like your life doesn’t matter.”

“ _I’m_ determined to act like my life doesn’t matter?” She feels her voice rising and is glad for the susurrus of the rain, muting everything. “You’re the one who tried to send nearly his _entire_ personal guard with me!”

“There _are_ other guards at the Palace! I just wanted the best ones with you! Solona, you hardly even know how to ride! What if you’d fallen and knocked yourself unconscious? How would the mighty slayer of darkspawn have protected herself then?” He moves closer as he speaks, head tipping down toward her, and from anyone else with his height, speaking at this volume, Solona might think it an act meant to intimidate, but from him—from him her greatest fear is that he’s about to put his hands on her face, thumbs stroking over her cheeks.

Which is exactly what he does, and she’s already backed herself up against a barrel, and there’s nowhere to retreat.

“Just make me a promise. Make me a promise, and I’ll go and let you be amazing and terrifying and do what you have to do.”

“What do you want me to promise?” Her voice is wary. Once, she would have promised Alistair anything. But now there’s just the King, and Solona has no business making promises to him that the Warden-Commander can’t keep.

“Promise me you won’t act like your life doesn’t matter. I know you’re the Warden-Commander. I understand what that means. But just… the next time you’re planning something, and there’s the crazy, reckless Solona option and a safer, more reasonable option, remember… that your life isn’t a thing with no value. Remember what it’s worth to me.”

She considers for a moment. There are enough broken promises between them without another she has no intention of keeping. But the truth is, how could she _not_ remember _exactly_ what he has done to keep her safe? “I’ll remember.”

One corner of his mouth rises then, a small, tender version of his smirk. “No, that was just the extra bit. The promise was that you won’t act like your life doesn’t matter.”

“Fine. I promise not to act like my life doesn’t matter.” _That’s_ never what she’s acted like anyway, she thinks. It’s never been that it doesn’t matter. It’s just that other things matter more.

He finally lets his hands fall then, taking a step back and ducking his head so that, for all his height, he suddenly seems to be the one looking up at her. “And when you’re done fixing the world _again_ —when you get whatever this is settled—will you come back? To the Palace?”

She draws a shaky breath. “You _know_ why I can’t do that.”

“Because of _this_?” He holds out the note she wrote to him the morning she left. A list of monarchs, and at the bottom the words, _not King Alistair_ , the word, “not,” underlined so hard the paper is nearly ripped through. “Because I know what you think this is a list of, but no one assassinates kings or queens or emperors because of who they’re sleeping with. Emperor Firmin was assassinated because there was a famine, and people were starving while he was hosting balls with cakes as tall as men every night. And Queen Jacinta—“

It amazes her that she, who knows next to nothing about politics—except, evidently, how to put a crown on a man’s head—has seen so clearly what he has missed. “That’s not it at all. That isn’t _just_ a list of monarchs who openly took mages for lovers, and you’re probably right when you say that _alone_ isn’t why they met their untimely ends. That’s a list of monarchs who the Chantry looked at and told, ‘No,’ and who didn’t heed and obey, _that’s_ what that is. And _I_ won’t be the excuse the Chantry uses in a hundred years when they write the history books that tell people why something horrible happened to _you_. I won’t be the leash they use to make you bow; I won’t be the thing they use to incite anyone against you. I won’t be a thing they _can_ use against you. _Ever_.”

He just shakes his head slowly, in a way that suggests more that he doesn’t _want_ to agree with her words than that he actually _doesn’t_ agree.

As much as it hurts, she presses on, pushes now, while he’s looking at her with that broken expression. Because she’s told him the reason that’s most true, the one that carries the most weight to her, so she might as well tell him the one that will hurt him the most, because when he walks away from here, he’s going to have to let go. He hasn’t yet, and he’s going to _have to_ , and however much it hurts, she’s the only one who can make him. “And I don’t need a useless wedding in a stupid dress, and I don’t _care_ who would call me your _whore_ , but you _are_ going to have to marry _someone_ _someday_. You said so _yourself_. And what am I supposed to do then? Would I be invited to your wedding? Would I get to carry flowers for your pretty bride? I can’t—I _can’t_. I can do _this_. I can let you go. I can stay here and be the Warden-Commander and listen to the stories people tell about you and watch you make the world a better place than it was. That’s what I can do. And you can go back to your Palace and marry some nobleman’s pretty daughter and maybe, if you try really hard, have pretty golden haired children and _make the world a better place_ —and just promise _me_ that _you_ won’t forget what happens to people who piss the Chantry off too much while you’re doing it.”

His head is still shaking. “I _meant_ it when—“

Why does he have to make it so _hard_? Why does he have to keep offering her something that she _can’t have_? She twists down on the pain, sharpening it intentionally into anger enough to allow her to do what she has to. “ _Stop_. Quite fucking honestly, I don’t have _time_ for this, _your Majesty_. I have _talking darkspawn_ to deal with.”

She knows with absolute certainty as she turns away that the image of him standing there, rain and tears running together on his face, will haunt her as long as she lives.

But if this is what he needs to be able to let go, then she’ll take it, and she’ll walk away, and she won’t look back, even if everything inside of her is.


	3. Set the Wild Echoes Flying

There are a thousand things to be done. There is no time for pain or pity or sorrow.

(No time, not whispering between every word spoken to her, _not_ flickering everywhere from the corner of her eye.) A litany of things that must be done carried her through a Blight, and she finds something like it carrying her now as well.

There’s a man who’s been held in the cells for three days now, kept safe there from the darkspawn by the same bars that hold him prisoner.

The moment the words, “Howe,” and, “my father,” come out of his mouth, she understands why he’s come. Needing to ask nothing else, she simply contemplates him while he glares at her until the seneschal arrives.

“Give him his family’s things, and let him go.”

She doesn’t know if the young Howe or Varel is more surprised. The seneschal, appalled, tries to talk her out of letting him take the things he broke in to steal, but she just crosses her arms, chin rising stubbornly. “Those things belong to him. At worst, he was trespassing.”

She can’t help thinking that the boy looks, if anything, _more_ angry with her now as he silently follows the guard to retrieve his family’s things.

Maybe _this_ was a reckless Solona decision. Maybe he’ll come back and kill her in her sleep. By everything that’s been said about him, it certainly seems like he’d be capable. But what else could she have done? Conscripted him? Whatever it was for her, whatever it was for Alistair, she has no illusions about the fact that, for anyone with another choice, this is a punishment. Thinking of a stack of papers, wrapped in leather to keep them dry, still in her pack, she cannot help feeling that wanting to reclaim something of your family is not such a crime. It does not deserve such a punishment.

But she has enough to worry about without letting this concern her.

She has three recruits preparing for their Joining.

She has a keep to make safe.

She has a Warden who wasn’t at the keep during the attack to track down.

She has a rumor about disappearing merchant caravans that she is somehow responsible for resolving.

She has talking darkspawn to figure out.

(She does _not_ have a thing sharply clawed and viscous as an archdemon trying to fight its way out of her chest), and there just isn’t any room for concern left.

 

 

She builds Mhairi’s funeral pyre herself.

It shouldn’t have shocked her like it did. After all, Solona herself was the only of three to survive her own Joining.

It shouldn’t have hit her like running face first into a stone wall when Varel looked up at her over the girl’s fallen body and shook his head.

But these were _her_ recruits. And that, she finds, changes everything.

It was Anders who had worried her. Whatever it is that pulls a recruit through the Joining, that sees them out to the other tainted side, she had thought that surely it must be measured in seriousness and dedication and devotion. Poor Anders, who didn’t deserve this, who her own actions had consigned to it, who was famous inside the walls of Kinloch Hold for his flippancy—she had worried for him.

Oghren, who is fearless (or maybe it’s sanity he’s lacking, not fear), who holds nothing back, who she’s _seen_ drink things that should probably have been certain death—she had not worried for him.

And Mhairi, who was the image of what a Warden recruit should be, who knew more about Vigil’s Keep than the Warden-Commander herself, who was so assured—what could there possibly have been to trouble Solona about her?

But the girl is dead, and this is the price of being Warden-Commander, and _Maker’s fucking breath_ , but she’s tired of _prices_.

She can suddenly see her time as Warden-Commander stretching out in front of her, a long line of dead recruits.

She thinks that when the next young and able body comes to throw itself on the pyre that is this entire order, burning itself up to push back the darkness, she would like to not have to see them at all until the Joining is done. And then she thinks of Duncan, of how gentle and kind he was to her on the road from the Circle to Ostagar, all the while knowing that he _couldn’t know_ if she would even survive, and she understands now that he was harder, braver, kinder, and stronger than she could possibly have guessed. And she swears to herself that even though she doesn’t _want_ to see them, she will. She will look every man and woman who offers themself to the Wardens in the eyes, and if they do not survive, she will let it hurt her. _This_ will be the sacrifice of the Warden who cheated death.

 

 

Of all the things they have to do, they were tracking down the Warden who wasn’t at the keep when the darkspawn attacked first. Because there are only three of them, and it was the reasonable thing to do first. Only then there’s a rumor about a hole straight down into the Deep Roads crawling with darkspawn, and there’s that quiet, secret terror welling up inside Solona of darkspawn who might exist to do something other than corrupt and destroy, and so they end up heading to the place marked on her map rather than following the trail of stale breadcrumbs in search of the Warden named Kristoff. And if Anders is dubious and Oghren just looks drunk, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s being _un_ reasonable.

In the end though, she knows that she’ll never be sorry that they arrived at the chasm in hills exactly when they did. Another week or two, and how far transformed would she have found the dwarven girl being dragged by her ankle back down into the darkness? How long does it even take for a broodmother to eclipse the woman it used to be? Not long enough to have saved Sigrun if they hadn’t arrived when they did, she’s sure of that.

Solona has seen the Legion of the Dead in action. She isn’t unaware what it means that the darkspawn gathered here crushed an entire squad. But she’s the Warden-Commander, and the Warden-Commander doesn’t walk away from a darkspawn breeding ground while it’s still intact. So down they go with the strange girl, half pluck and half pessimism. When she asks Solona why she would do this, and Solona tells her because it’s the right thing, the girl gives her a look that’s either pitying amusement or just maybe admiration when she responds, “You know, someone once told me that evil always triumphs because good is stupid. This is a textbook case.”

It isn’t so hopeless as that though. Down in what was once Kal'Hirol, they find a side entrance to the main hall, and Anders seals the doors while she calls down shards of ice and freezing winds laced with lightening and Oghren and Sigrun pick off the darkspawn who find their way out of it. When there’s nothing left alive to make its way out, she lets the spell die.

The moment silence descends, Anders breaks it with a whoop. “Would you look at that? We _haven’t_ been reduced to a fine paste to be spread on darkspawn crackers yet after all!” And then he turns his back to the heap of dead darkspawn, hikes up the hem of his robes, bends over, and proceeds to wag his arse back and forth at their fallen enemies.

For a long moment Solona can only stare at him (view mercifully blocked by the angle) in stupefaction as something rises up inside her. It starts as a choking sort of snort and grows and grows until she’s laughing so hard she has to sit on the floor, hands clutching her stomach.

When she can finally breath properly, she practically floats back to her feet. They’re all staring at her, even Anders, who looks as bemused as Oghren and Sigrun, and she doesn’t know what to say, so she settles for, “Right. So. Onward then,” because she doesn’t know how to tell Anders what he’s done for her. That she was struggling under the burden of a thousand things she is supposed to bear up, and for just a moment now all of them have risen up with the sound of laughter, and even if they will fall back onto her soon enough, _right now_ without them she feels _weightless_.

And even if there are some kind of twisted darkspawn that she has never seen before, and even if there are no answers to the terror of talking darkspawn, when she leaves those caverns days later with a girl whose attention keeps shifting with curiosity between the sky turning pink and gold as the sun sets and Anders' hands as he heals Solona’s bloodied lip, she thinks she’s done at least one thing right this week. She’s taken back something strange and wonderful that the darkness would have swallowed up without her.


	4. Let the World Dream Otherwise

Back at the Vigil, she thinks the man standing outside the gate is one of the soldiers. It isn’t until they’re only feet away, and he steps forward from the wall, calling out to her, that she realizes it’s Nathaniel Howe.

When Oghren mutters, “Careful. This one just might go all Zevran on you,” she knows exactly what he means, but all she can think is that to make another friend like that would require more luck than she thinks the Maker has left reserved for her.

The arl’s son wants to know _why_ she let him go.

What is there to say? That she grew up a prisoner for a crime she never committed, for something in her blood? That she’s seen what comes of systems where one is punished for anther’s crimes, and she won’t be a part of any such thing? She crosses her arms. “What you do now is your own responsibility.”

“I see.” It’s so long before he speaks again that she is about to brush past him through the gate when he finally does. “Take me with you. Make me a Grey Warden.”

It isn’t her job to talk anyone out of joining the Grey Wardens. In fact, it’s her job to recruit people, to convince them  _to_ join. To convince them to offer their lives freely with no guarantee the sacrifice will achieve anything at all. But despite the fact that Nathaniel is older than her, truly more man than boy, he seems like such a hurt, angry child. “It’s not that easy, Nathaniel.”

“I have nowhere to go. I fully expected to die in there; maybe I even wanted to. But you let me go.” His shoulders rise as he draws himself up to his full height. “Make me a Grey Warden. Let me try. Please.”

Maybe there is something there in him aside from pain and anger. Maybe she was wrong before. Maybe what being a Grey Warden is for her, what it still would be for someone else if she hadn’t taken it away from him—maybe it could be that for Nathaniel too. “Very well. We’ll see how you do with the Joining.”

 

 

For once, there is a Joining with no deaths.

Sigrun looks down right cozy, sleeping peacefully where she fell.

Despite the surprise that it is to Varel, Nathaniel’s survival is not a surprise to her. But maybe that’s just her curse. Maybe she’s the Commander who will always believe that every one of her recruits will survive. Maker help her when it isn’t so.

She cannot sleep. Even though they are heading out at the crack of dawn to find out what it is that’s plaguing the Pilgrim’s Path (because she cannot bear another single stern lecture from Mistress Woolsey on the importance of trade), even though she should grab what sleep she can, while she can, she and Muffin are in the stables with Eluvia as she feeds them both bits of apple.

“She’s a fine horse. An Anderfels Courser?”

She looks up at Nathaniel, at the circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes, and thinks that he is surely even more in need of sleep that herself. He must have only just come to, and she cannot think what possessed him to leave the bed Varel and Anders had carried him to. “She is.”

He nods. “I used to have an Amaranthine Charger. Dane. That was his stall.”

She has no idea how to read him, whether this is idle conversation to distract him from whatever is keeping him awake, or if the fact that her horse is now in a stall that was once home to his own is some kind of accusation. “Do you want me to move her?”

He raises an eyebrow. “I won’t pretend I’m delighted to see my family’s home… so changed, but I will make an effort not to be ridiculous about it.” He steps closer to the horse, and when he lays one hand on the bridge of her nose, she pushes her face into it trustingly. “What’s her name?”

“Eluvia.”

He contemplates this for a moment. “Sacrifice. As in, ‘In death?’”

She hesitates. It would be easy to dismiss him, to avoid the question or lie, but here he is, a son whose father died choking on blood she’d drawn, making an effort. “No. For the constellation itself.” For a story told, she doesn’t add, for a night that felt like the first night of the rest of her life. If it’s obvious there’s something more, he doesn’t ask.

 

 

It’s the tiny, insignificant memories that sneak up on her in the quiet moments that haunt her with the most persistence. Taking down her hair, thinking of someone else’s fingers pulling out the pins. _One day_ , she thinks, _this won’t hurt anymore_. Wynne had promised.

When the pins are gathered in a pile on her bedside table, she scoops them up, walks to the window, and tosses them out. Letting the cold air hit her face, she breathes slowly. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she will eradicate everything that makes her weak. After having worn her hair the same way nearly everyday since she left the Circle, in the morning she puts it in a single, simple braid down her back, with no pins to pull and no memories to haunt.

 

 

Solona can’t help finding it a touch ironic when the Dalish mage responsible for all the devastation littered across the Pilgrim’s Path accuses her of being, “Another scavenger here to prey on the misfortunes of others,” given that the woman herself _is_ the misfortune of others. She finds it harder to judge when she realizes the woman’s sister is missing. Because everything about the idea of family is still twisted up inside her, and she’s only even known she _has_ brothers and sisters for a handful of weeks, but she thinks already, without even knowing them at all, without having set eyes on them, that she would _kill_ for them. And even worse, the elf’s sister was taken by _darkspawn_. Darkspawn, clever enough to plant weapons, to create a conspiracy, to take living hostages. Something terrible is going on here, and Solona isn’t sure she even _wants_ to get to the bottom of it, but she has to carry right on, tripping, stumbling, rushing forward to some inevitable conclusion she can’t yet guess at.

When she wakes in a prison cell far enough below the Wending Wood’s silverite mines to be considered the Deep Roads proper, unsure if the darkspawn emissary who reassured her gently that her wounds had been tended was a dream or not, she finds herself retching on the floor, and she knows it’s no side effect of the magic worked on her. It is pure, cold terror. _Please, please let it have been a dream_.

She doesn’t really believe it was. But by the time they’ve fought their way through the mine, reclaiming their weapons and armor from darkspawn that remind her disturbingly of children playing dress up, she finds that maybe it doesn’t matter after all. Because the emissary with the gentle voice can say he doesn’t want to be her enemy, and he can heal her cuts, but he can’t take back the things she’s seen getting here. He can’t take back the Warden named Keenan, lying in his own filth with his legs crushed. He can’t take back the way she argued with the man, insisting she would get him out of there. He can’t take back the moment she didn’t understand fast enough that Keenan, determined not to be the reason the Warden-Commander didn’t make it out of those mines alive, was taking the decision out of her hands, reaching for her dagger and driving it between his own ribs before she could stop him.

He can’t take back any of those things, but she’s pretty sure he can die, just like any other darkspawn.

She just hopes that they can save Velanna’s sister doing it, because saving her sister is a fire burning in the heart of that woman, and if they can’t, she doesn’t know what will be left there but ash.


	5. There, as Here, Ruin Opens the Tomb, the Temple

When her eyes open to the world bathed in a sickly greenish light, she groans. “Oh, come on. Not _here_.”

“Where, precisely, is _here_?” Nathaniel’s tone is no more impressed than her own.

She’s too preoccupied with her vexation to answer when she turns and sees both Anders and Velanna already three steps ahead of her, eyes on Sigrun and Oghren, expressions concerned.

Velanna is making agitated little gestures with her staff. “I think the better question is, what are the Children of the Stone doing in the Beyond?”

Sigrun’s face lights up. “The Beyond? You mean the Fade? Really? _This_ is the Fade? _I’m_ in the _Fade_? This is amazing! You should put this on your dwarven recruitment posters! Join the Grey Wardens; walk in the Fade!”

Anders is giving Sigrun the look of bewildered amusement that is rapidly becoming his standard expression for regarding her. “Really, I’m not complaining, because there can never be _too_ _many_ axes between me and darkspawn and demons, but this is perhaps a bit more _concerning_ than _amazing_. And probably _not_ a selling point for the Wardens.”

“Hey, uh… being in the Fade… does that mean that if I drink _all_ of my whiskey _now_ , you can just magic my flask full again?”

Anders’ grin becomes half grimace as he looks at Oghren. “And here I was, concerned you’d work yourself into a state about the fact that, in the _Fade_ , you actually _might_ fall into the sky. Good to see you have your priorities in order, my foul-smelling friend.”

Face paling, Oghren glances quickly at the sky, and with a mutter that sounds distinctly like, “Fuck it,” he does indeed down the entire contents of his flask.

Blackmarsh proper is nothing like the desolate, decaying version of itself left in the waking world. Here people are everywhere, and though they stare at Solona and her companions with wide, stunned eyes, no one will speak to them. No one but the spirit instigating the riot outside the estate at the heart of the village.

He reminds Solona of the spirit of Valor she encountered during her Harrowing, though she thinks that Justice is perhaps an even nobler virtue. Beyond this, he captures little of her attention. In an academic setting, she would find him intriguing. But this is hardly the moment for that. Here, she is occupied with figuring out the machinations of these damned talking darkspawn, with figuring out how she’s going to get her companions—particularly Oghren and Sigrun, who should never have been able to come here to begin with— _out_. It isn’t until raindrops sliding over her face draw her from sleep back in the world of mortals and the corpse beside her rises up along with her companions that she truly gives the being much though. It is with the keenest sense of sorrow—and beneath it, horror—that she watches the body that was once someone else’s bring its hands to its face in agony as the spirit finds itself imprisoned in flesh. She doesn’t know what she could have done differently, how she could have stopped this, but it does not keep her from feeling that, once _again_ , she has set in motion something that can only end in misery.

 

 

They return to the Vigil to find Kristoff’s wife waiting in the courtyard. The look of relief when she sees her husband’s body walking toward her cannot be dimmed even by concern over the wasted state of his face, cheeks sunken, skin ashen and mottled.

When the woman understands that her husband is gone and flees from them, the spirit feels it acutely, the sense that her pain is unjust, that he has somehow betrayed himself by hurting her so.

They track her down days later, on her knees in the Chantry. When she agrees to speak with them, Solona understands that she is, despite her heartbreak, no wilting flower. What wife of a Warden could afford to be? When she lays her hand on Justice’s face, though there is yearning and nostalgia in the movement, there is something else. Solona can only guess at the courage and compassion necessary to allow her such an action. What is unbearable to look at is the face of the man who was once Kristoff. To see something that can’t come back nearly waking, to know that it is _changing_ the changeless spirit who was never meant to feel any such thing…

Unable to watch, Solona has to walk away and wait for Justice at the doors. When he joins her, she has no words. She simply lays a hand on his shoulder because she doesn’t know what other sympathy to offer a creature who has just been battered with the knowledge of what dwells in the hearts of men.

 

 

In her room, Solona sits at the edge of her bed, fingers tracing over familiar lettering spelling out her name on the invitation delivered for her while she was wandering in the Fade. A ball to honor the new King. The wording has Eamon’s hand all over it, and even she has enough political proficiency to read what isn’t explicitly stated: the chancellor—it would seem Eamon has abdicated his arling in favor of his younger brother—is looking for a wife for Alistair. She wonders if the King addressed her invitation himself in an effort to reassure her that he truly does want her there, or if it is because Eamon refused to allow her on the guest list, and he had to steal the invitation and address it in secret to send it at all. For a moment, the idea of Eamon’s displeasure at her appearance almost tempts her. And then she reminds herself that none of these things matter anymore. Still her hand hesitates when she would toss the paper into the fire; instead, despite her certainty that she will not attend, opening a drawer in the nightstand, she sets the paper beside a little wooden figure with a sword in one hand and a staff in the other. All other reasons to ignore the invitation aside, in the morning will be the ceremony where the lords and ladies of Amaranthine will swear fealty to her. That alone will surely fill the quota of how much politicking she can endure for the foreseeable future.

 

 

Of course there is more to do than smile politely and pretend that anything in her life has prepared her to stand idly in front of nobles and receive their shallow words of devotion. That would merely have been painful. Maker forbid there be a day without a difficult decision and the cold apprehension that she may soon regret it.

Just before the doors open, Nathaniel passes behind her where she’s standing in frontof a seat that reminds her disconcertingly of a modest throne. He digs two fingers into her spine between her shoulder blades as he goes, murmuring so quietly that not even the seneschal can hear, “Don’t slouch. They’ll find enough to judge you for without you making it that easy for them.”

He is, of course, correct. She can see the judgement in almost every face as they give her their bored recitations, and she cannot help that it clouds her thoughts when two of the nobles bring to her their argument about whose need of her soldiers is greater.

She considers carefully where to send the soldiers under her command. She’s frightened that the reason she is inclined to send her soldiers to the farmlands is because Lord Eddlebrek is the only noble in the room who has given her a smile with anything genuine behind it. That it’s because, of all the bored nobles here, Bann Esmerelle’s pinched, forced smile and calculating eyes make her particularly uneasy. But even she, who has never truly wanted for food, understands the importance of protecting the land and the people who grow it. How long can even those inside Amaranthine’s walls survive without enough to eat? And what Eddlebrek does not mention, what seems so obvious to her, is that there are already more than walls protecting the city. Does Bann Esmerelle think that Constable Aidan is only interested in thwarting smugglers? That the city guard will stand aside and hold the gates open when darkspawn press on Amaranthine? So she sends what soldiers she can to the farmlands, and when the Lord of the Feravel Plains gives her a smile warm as sun baked earth, she lets it push away the chilled whispers always asking her if she’s done the right thing.

 

 

When she cannot sleep, she walks the battlements, the grounds, the shadowed corners, until the Commander knows every inch of her keep. She’s on the battlements when she hears the sound: soft, tiny, pitiful. It’s raining and cold, and though she hardly feels it, the little creature below clearly does. Muffin gives a small whine and cocks his head as though to ask her what she intends to do about this. She has to run, wet, sliding on stone floors, to get to the yard below. She usually avoids this yard, especially when the weather is poor. It calls up an image always too ready to trouble her, and all the more fiercely when rain is trickling off of everything. But the desperate mewling is louder now, and she follows it until she finds its source, hidden in a space barely big enough for it behind a tower of crates. A kitten, hardly bigger than her palm, its orange fur plastered to it as it shivers.

Reaching it requires a bit of contortion, lying on her stomach on the uneven tower, arm wedged into the space between the crates and the wall. She expects it to bite her when she finally grasps it up, has a paralysis spell ready, but all it does is shiver and cry louder and then burrow against her piteously when she brings it to her chest. Muffin is jumping beside her, trying to get a better look, but she ignores him, carefully pulling warmth from the Fade, pressing it around the kitten with her hands as she tilts her head to help cover it from the rain. It doesn’t seem nearly enough. The kitten is weak and tiny and shivering, and she’s never been very good at healing. There’s only one person she would trust now with this.

It takes a moment for Anders to open his door, the hem of his robes still settling around him, hair sleep tousled, but the blear leaves his eyes the moment they settle on her. “What’s wrong?”

She has to pull the kitten’s minuscule claws out of the fabric of her armor, and the moment she gets them loose, it begins screaming again, little paws reaching for her as she holds it out with both hands.

“Andraste’s ass, where did you find it?” His hands are already lighting up with magic as he takes the kitten from her. Muffin watches the transfer with rapt attention.

She hoovers around him uselessly. “Out in the yard. Is it going to be okay?”

She doesn’t know exactly what spells he’s used, but after a long, quiet moment, when his palms open around the kitten, its fur is dry, puffed out around it. He shifts it around gently, examining it. “We’ll have to keep an eye on it. If it starts coughing or sneezing it could be bad.” He looks up at her with a grin. “But, yeah. I think he’ll be fine. Let’s go get him some milk.”

In the kitchen, Anders sits on the counter while she retrieves the last of yesterday’s goat milk from the larder and pours it into a shallow bowl.

He’s talking to it softly, soothingly, and she isn’t paying much attention until one sentence catches her. “Where’s your mother?”

He’s murmuring about something else entirely by the time she seats herself on a stool beside him and leans forward, elbows on the table, chin in her hands. Muffin jumps up beside her, paws steadying himself to watch the kitten.

Anders gives the dog a skeptical look. “He isn’t going to eat him, is he?”

She laughs. “Muffin? I’m pretty sure he wants to lick him, but I don’t think it’s a food related impulse.” The smile fades. She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and then releases it. “Anders? You escaped the Circle seven times. Did you… have you ever seen your mother again? Since…”

She wonders if he’ll answer her. The odds are even that he’ll just give her that trying-to-charm-her-out-of-her-pants smile and say something ridiculous.

He doesn’t though. “My fourth escape, I made it all the way to the house where I grew up. There were templars waiting for me, but it was obvious no one had lived there in years. The roof had caved in.” And then he gives her a look, the kind of serious study that Anders normally reserves exclusively for healing. _And why not_ , she thinks. It’s surely a wound he’s probing now. “You were already at the Circle when they first brought me, and you couldn’t have been more than six. You must have been as tiny as this kitten when they brought you. Do you even remember your mother at all?”

She shrugs, not entirely comfortable, but determined that if she can ask, she can answer. “I remember her voice. I was recently… given a portrait of her. Sometimes I think I might remember that woman, but maybe it’s just idle fantasy born of staring at it too long.” She takes a deep breath, preparing herself to talk about what she has not yet had the courage to speak of to anyone, because surely Anders will understand. Who but he could? “She disappeared. After my brothers and sisters were taken too. I have… I have four. Siblings. All mages.”

He snorts bitterly. “And they wouldn’t even allow you all to be locked up in the _same_ prison, so you could at least be together, of course.”

“I didn’t even know. That they exist.”

He nods slowly. “How _did_ you find out?”

She shrugs, more uncomfortable now even than before. “I… had someone look into it.”

“Someone, huh?” He reaches out and touches something on the front of her armor as he gives her an amused smile. “Must have been someone with a lot of resources at their disposal to dig through Chantry secrets and lies like that.”

She hadn’t realized the pendant she wears around her neck had come out from where she keeps it beneath her armor—probably in her awkward maneuvering getting the kitten. She tucks it back quickly, muttering, “Mabaris, like Muffin.” The weak excuse _he_ used when he gave her the necklace sounds even more futile when she knows Anders has already recognized the Theirin heraldry for what it is. She should leave it in the drawer with the other things she doesn’t have time for.

“I see. Yes, obviously. Because people always keep tokens to remind them of their pets tucked away under their clothing like it’s either their last line of defense or the one weakness they’re allowed.”

She feels something like panic rising up. They don’t talk about this. She doesn’t talk about it with anyone. She’s come to depend on the Wardens she’s made for more things than she can count, but she does not talk about _this_. Ever. With anyone.

“ _Stop it_. I don’t talk to you about Karl. I don’t bring that up. And you don’t talk to me about _this_. Just _don’t_.”

He draws back from her an few inches with a look that flashes through more emotions than should fit in a span of seconds. Surprise and hurt and comprehension and sympathy and something shared. “I… didn’t know. The way he looked at you that night, I thought… I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

She nods and there’s a long silence that they’re both hesitant to break until the sound of earthenware shattering on the floor breaks it for them. The kitten scrambles back from the edge of the counter, startled, ears back, eyes a little crazy, and then turns and leaps at Anders, landing about halfway up his chest and clambering to pull himself the rest of the way until he’s perched on the healer’s shoulder, suddenly calm again. And then they’re both giggling as Anders rubs one finger along the kitten’s tiny head. “I knight thee Ser Pounce-a-lot of the Order of the Grey Wardens.”

She laughs harder. “We don’t have knights.”

“Don’t listen to her. You are most certainly a tiny knight, Ser Pounce-a-lot.”


	6. In a Pattern Called War

They go to the coast to rescue a nobleman’s daughter. The seneschal and the captain of the guard are in agreement that this will buy the Wardens—and Solona, in particular—the kind of favor that the near-riot days ago has proven she requires. It isn't that she doesn't want to help the man; it isn't that she doesn't care what happens to a girl whose only crime is to have a father wealthy enough to pay a ransom—but whatever is going on between these factions of fighting, talking darkspawn is winding itself tighter and tighter, a tension she can feel approaching a breaking point. She has every certainty that Gaverel could have dealt with this himself, while she did what the Warden-Commander should be doing. And yet, as acting Arlessa, politics have twisted everything. Her desire to do some good, to _help_ , is evidently now worthless if it can't be witnessed and credited to her and traded in for public good will. She's ruminating on this with no great pleasure when they crest the last cliff, and the Waking Sea stretches out in front of her. It takes her breath right out of her. A dozen shades of blue swirling, lines of greyish white dancing over it, catching the sunlight here and there where it breaks through the clouds, stretching on and on until it meets the sky itself… And suddenly she knows she's seen this before. It isn't a cold memory of templar gauntlets and the first taste of fear that comes to her, as she might have expected, either. This memory has nothing to do with the trip from Kirkwall to the Circle that she still can’t recall. As she just stares, she thinks that she knows exactly what it would feel like to stand so far below where the water at laps the shore. She knows the sinking, tickling sensation of the tide pulling at the sand beneath her still feet, one hand fisted in the silk skirts of the woman behind her, and the memory is so visceral it nearly brings her to her knees.

Fortunately, putting away her emotions is something she’s gotten quite good at. Unfortunately, the view around her keeps trying to tug them back out. She’s half distracted crossing the rope bridge strung between where the earth falls away and the outcropping of land ahead, where she’s meant to meet the girl and her kidnappers. She’s half distracted when she issues her threat to the kidnappers. It comes from the place inside her that doesn’t hesitate to lie, and she doesn’t even realize it isn’t one until the words are out: “There’s a river of blood behind me. Touch her if you dare.” If it was a bluff coming out, it isn’t anymore when the men who don’t back away call it. In minutes it’s over, and the only sounds are the rhythmic crash of the sea below and the counterpoint of the girl’s gasping sobs harmonizing with it. When her crying subsides enough to speak between shaky breaths, Solona sends her to her father with Nathaniel, who is the only one of her Wardens with enough propriety and subtlety to be trusted to deal with the nobility—because, she sometimes forgets, he was one himself only a year ago.

When they’re gone, she finds a place where steps have been carved into the cliffside and makes her way down to the beach below. Once there she yanks at the laces of her boots and tugs until her feet are free, tosses her socks aside, and then grins in delight. The sensation on her toes is exactly what she knew it would be. She hurries down to where the retreating water has left the sand damp and waits with baited breath for it to return, unable to suppress a shriek when it does, crashing around her ankles colder than she expects. With every rushing return, something inside her fills up higher and higher, until she realizes that  _this_ is something new on a sort of secret list she keeps. _The sun, and the stars, and the_ ** _sea_**. This brings with it a thought that comes to her unintended, unwanted. She wonders if Alistair has ever seen the sea. The thing rising higher and higher inside of her suddenly cracks something open, something she keeps closed up tight, and, _Maker forgive me_ , he should be _here_ for this, he should be with her. She didn’t understand when she made her decision—what Anora is, maybe that’s just what politics do to everyone eventually, what it’s doing to him right now, what it’ll do to Solona herself sooner of later. Maker help her, she was wrong about _everything_ , and she can’t do this without him; she can’t do this _alone_ …

That’s when a hand slips into hers. “ _Wow_.” There are a dozen unspoken things in the way Sigrun says the one word, but none of them demand anything from Solona. She just stands there silently, a look of awe on her face, her hand warm and steady, reminding Solona that she _isn’t_ _alone_ as she packs back up all the things adrift inside herself. When it’s all tucked away again, she tells herself first, _It’s okay_. It’s not that though. The sound of Anders yelling and laughing reminds her. Though he would probably say differently, the Circle was _okay_. In the Circle, she was _okay_. No matter what, no matter how wrong she may or may not have been, this, _this_ will _always_ be so much more than _okay_. When she finally turns away from the sea it’s to find Anders stripping out of his Warden armor with the slowness of unfamiliarity. It’s the first time he’s worn the armor, though she gave it to him weeks ago. When he gets down to his smalls, she turns away. _Andraste have mercy, say he isn’t going to_ —

And then something lands on her head. She makes a noise of outrage as she tosses his smallclothes away from her. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Anders!” The exclamation is perhaps a little ruined by the fact that she can’t even get it all the way out before she’s laughing at Anders running, shamelessly naked, into the waves.

 

 

When the tension between the rival factions of darkspawn finally does snap, it sends her ricocheting off the walls of Amaranthine, staring at the talking darkspawn messenger who she cannot help thinking looks like a fresh-to-the-Circle apprentice, hood pulled low over his face, shoulders drawn up, scared, ashamed, but maybe a little hopeful. And then Gaverel says they should burn the city to the ground, and the feeling that she’s spinning helplessly in circles stops suddenly, grounded by a rush of fury.

“Is that what you think that Wardens do? Anything to defeat the Blight,” she snorts with disgust, “that’s what they say, isn’t it? Well it’s _fucking wrong_. Anything to _protect people from_ the Blight— _that’s_ what we do.” She levels a look at her Wardens. “Nathaniel, Oghren, Anders. Go back to the Vigil, and do what you can. Sigrun, Velanna, Justice, Muffin—let’s go clarify what _exactly_ it is that Grey Wardens do.”

 

 

There’s fighting, and fighting, and sleeping in a barricaded Chantry, and more fighting. When a jagged piece of metal on the armored ogre that is unlike anything she’s ever seen catches her across the cheek, she’s lucky Velanna is there. The elf is no Anders but she’s certainly better at healing than Solona herself. It’s only when Justice finally takes the thing down with a clever blade between plates of mail that she can check the damage with her fingertips. The slightest ridge, hardly even palpable. Not that it matters overmuch. Maybe it’ll even be a good thing. Perhaps Varel can trade this, too, in for some good will toward the Wardens. When she doesn’t bother to wipe the blood away, Sigrun does it for her, dragging her to a tree stump to sit, where Muffin immediately takes advantage of her lap to put his head in it. After she’s used her own spit to wipe away the blood that had already dried and crusted over, Sigrun tips Solona’s chin with her fingers and evaluates. “It’s actually quite swanky, you know. Almost intentional looking, really. Very, ‘I, Hero of Ferelden, Vanquisher of the Fifth Blight, have saved you all from untold dangers. Behold this posh illustration of the ferocity I have defeated.’” When Solona leans forward, laughing, and throws her arms around the dwarf, she freezes. Solona wonders if she’s ever been hugged at all before. Possibly not. Not wanting to make her uncomfortable, she’s quickly drawing away when Sigrun moves suddenly, returning the hug with such enthusiasm that Solona’s breath leaves her in a almost painful huff. When Sigrun draws back, bright-eyed, bouncing on the balls of her feet, she grins at Solona. “So, having failed to throw ourselves at death sufficiently enough to actually die, shall we put in another good effort?”

 

 

By the time they make it through the Dragonbone Wastes and into Drake’s Fall below, throwing themselves at death doesn’t sound like a terribly inaccurate description of what they’re doing. But then, there’ve only been a handful of things she’s done since she left Kinloch Hold that _can’t_ be roughly described as such.

When she stands before the darkspawn emissary who calls himself the Architect, she asks him about what it is he’s plotting with the same desperation she once asked Anora why she’d be a better monarch of Ferelden than Alistair.

She thinks of Seranni’s words, how these darkspawn are all like _children_ , and not the creatures so dubbed by the Mother; they are all fumbling through the darkness down here, struggling to understand the meaning of the words, “good,” and, “fair.” It’s been a long time since she thought of herself as a mage first and foremost, above Commander or Warden or stupid girl who’s gone and torn out her own heart, but she finds she can’t help doing so now. She thinks of herself standing in front of Knight-Commander Greagoir, how it didn’t matter what she had actually done or why she had done it or what she had known. She had been found guilty where she stood by virtue of _being_ a mage. She would turn her magic on herself before she will allow herself to be culpable of the same blind discrimination.

The darkspawn tells her with his soothing voice that the Wardens brought to him were _already_ dead, as though that absolves him of guilt for his part in their deaths. He talks to her about what is right as though it can be measured in quantities, as though goodness can be weighed in outcomes on a scale. He isn’t just childishly ignorant. He is incapable of understanding how or why cleaning Keenan’s blood off her own dagger has _changed_ her. Before, she would have let him convince her. But that action, that blood, has torn her all the way down to the place where her unshakable faith in the good that can come of hard decisions and courage resides. Before, her faith, her _hope_ , would have carried her through this. Bleeding as it is, it will carry her no further.

Having said all he has to say, the Architect is simply waiting for her decision when she feels her faith give out on. And even though she knows the piece of her that will wonder if she wasn’t wrong, that will wonder what good _could_ have come from this creature, will be bigger and harder to leave behind than the pieces of herself she’s left with so many other decisions, she shakes her head. “I _can’t_ help you.”

Even then, he doesn’t understand. He thinks her too bound to some theoretical Warden nature. He doesn’t understand that, even in the Circle when she kept silent and cowered, Solona Amell has never answered to anyone but her own heart.


	7. The Fragile Ship of Courage

It would seem Voldrik knew what he was doing when he demanded she march all over her arling searching for just the right stone to rebuild her keep, because it is, when she returns to it, a bit the worse for wear but still standing. The seneschal and soldiers by the dozens are dead, but her Wardens have survived: Oghren is unconscious but alive; Nathaniel is bloody but on his feet; Anders doesn’t even have a hair out of place, but when she looks closer she catches the telltale tremble that speaks of extreme mana depletion and understands just how close a call it was for her Wardens. It takes days for Oghren to wake, and as they pass life settles into a sort of routine. Her actions in Amaranthine have won the Wardens enough favor even to satisfy Garevel, who takes over as seneschal, and Mistress Woolsey, and this buys her at least a temporary respite from the worst of their political maneuvering.

Sleepless as ever, walking the battlements, she finds Anders sitting tucked between two merlons into the crenellated gap, legs dangling over the edge. Ser Pounce-a-lot—it would seem Anders hadn’t been joking about the name—is in his customary perch on the healer’s shoulder.

“Don’t you feel it too? Like an itch under your skin.”

She runs her fingers over Pounce’s head, which he takes as a sign that she has offered her fingers to be gnawed upon. “Feel what?” She can tell from Anders’ tone that this is one of those rare occasions on which he has dropped the mask of frivolity he usually maintains so carefully.

“This, it’s not the Circle, but… We aren’t really free, are we? We’ve traded in more than half our lives for what? A handful of freedoms that don’t add up to a whole. The semblance of freedom. It’s not like we can just walk away.”

It takes her a moment to gather what she wants to say, so she climbs onto the merlon beside him, looking down at his fair hair reflecting the moonlight. “I could have walked away. After the Blight. And knowing I didn’t _have_ to do this… It meant everything, but the thing is, Anders, it didn’t change what _you_ think it would. If you think the threat of the Circle is the only thing binding you to the Wardens, then I don’t know what to tell you other than that you haven’t really learned anything about freedom at all. The only people who are _free_ like that are the ones who don’t care about anything—and we both know that isn’t you.”

She takes a deep breath. The words she’s about to say are a certain sort of dangerous, because she knows what it feels like to lose people she depends on, and she _does_ depend on Anders—silly, absurd, courageous, _kind_ Anders. But she feels that they need to be said. “I can’t give you back the years of your life that have been taken from you. I can’t make you think that what we do is something worthwhile if you don’t. But you have to know… Anders, you can’t think that if you left here, I’d hunt you down like a templar, or send one of them after you.”

“Commander,” he says, and she knows he’s joking, or at least pretending to, because he _never_ calls her Commander, “are you giving me permission to run away?” He grins like it’s a joke too, but she can’t help wondering how much it really is.

“No. You’re… you’re my friend. I only have so many of those, and I’ve watched enough of them walk away from me. But I don’t want you to spend the rest of what life you do get in this keep feeling like you didn’t have any choice. Like you didn’t and wouldn’t have chosen this.”

“Yeah, well… It’s not so bad, I suppose.” He smiles at her, something more sincere than most of the expressions he keeps in place. “ _You’re_ not so bad.” When his smile changes, leaving him eying her in a way that’s both ridiculous and suggestive, she knows there will be no more serious conversation tonight. “…And for a shite job, it does come with a lovely view.”

She groans. “You don’t stop, do you?”

He leans closer, grin stretching wider, brows wiggling up and down. “You know, normally when I’m asked that it’s in a _completely_ different context.”

 

 

The grass is very soft and… grassy. It’s nice. But the stars… well, she thinks the stars have been drinking too. Because they’re really very wobbly.

“Motherless spawn of the Blight funk! You couldn’t find a bronto’s cunt in a pen with four of them in heat!” Oghren bellows beside her.

He is under the impression that her cursing is lack luster. And so they are sprawled in the yard, him yelling curses at the sky while she dutifully repeats. Or tries to. “Mother—motherless… what’s the Blight funk?”

“What cakes the walls wherever the darkspawn’ve been down in the Deep Roads, like they’ve all been giving their swords a good—“

She laughs so hard she has to roll to her side to breathe. “No, no, I don’t need a ninety-five item list of euphemisms—I understand. That’ll do.”

That’s when Sigrun’s voice rings out. “What in the name of every Paragon ever elected are the two of you doing?” She does not sound amused. Which is a shame, because everything is really quite funny.

Solona rolls back over and waves happily. “Sigrun! Oghren is teaching me the better to curse you with.” The words tangle up on her tongue, but she thinks that what comes out makes some kind of sense regardless.

Sigrun’s arms cross and one brow raises. “Exactly how drunk are you?”

“How drunk am I? How does one measure drunk?” Solona contemplates this and then thrusts her hand in the air with three fingers held up. “Three! I am three drunk.”

“Just to be perfectly clear…” Sigrun moves to stand over Oghren with an expression that even Solona, in her muddled state, can identify as rather terrifying. “If you lay one finger on her—”

Though the number of times she’s seen Oghren legitimately offended since she met him can be counted on one, maybe two hands, there is no doubt that he is now as sputters, “By the Stone, woman, I’m not _that_ kind of a pervert! I mean, I can’t help it if the kid’s got a great rack and all, but she’s a _kid_!”

For a moment she thinks maybe she should be relieved. And then her attention catches on exactly how he has described her. “A kid?!” She sits up, suddenly incensed. “I am your Warden-Commander! I am a slayer of archdemons! I—I _can_ find a bronto’s cunt! Not that I—oh. I am—” her voice falters, “—maybe not three drunk. Maybe—maybe seven. Or possibly nine.”

Oghren and Sigrun’s voices drift around as she lies back again. They’re talking about getting her to her bed. Unnecessary, she wants to tell them. It’s really quite comfy right here.

And then her arm is being dragged across a bony shoulder as she’s hauled mostly upright against someone shorter than herself who smells of juniper and something she can only describe as rain. “Velanna… you smell nice.”

“Well, I won’t if you vomit on me. Perhaps you should keep your mouth shut, to be safe.”

They’re in Solona’s rooms, nearly to the bed by the time she realizes the elf isn’t so much helping her walk as dragging her along. “You’re really very strong, you know.”

There’s a dismissive _humph_ near her ear. “Perhaps. Or perhaps you shemlen simply aren’t as mighty as you think.”

“Alistair is mighty.” She thinks maybe she’s said something she isn’t supposed to, but she isn’t entirely sure why as she sighs happily. “I’d never have stopped the Blight without him. He’s _mighty_ , and he smells nice too, better than you even. He smells like the warmth in front of a camp fire and green grass in the morning light and… and _Alistair_.”

She lands on the bed with a plop when Velanna releases her, squinting with annoyed incomprehension. “What are you even talking about? The shemlen king?”

Solona waves a hand above her as though batting something away. “No, that’s someone else. He was _my_ Alistair first.”

She sighs, and where Solona, if she were thinking clearly, might have expected derision, there is only benign exasperation. “You foolish girl. Is that why you’ve drunken yourself into a positive stupor?”

“No. Not that.” She has to think for a moment to remember, voice slowly gaining a bit of steadiness as she speaks. “Because I have two brothers and two sisters. Because they live in four different Circles. Because my mother disappeared and not even all the King’s soldiers and all the King’s men could find her again. Because I’m afraid of going to meet my brothers and sisters. Because what if they don’t want to meet me? What if they hate me? What if, what if, what if? And so: drinking. And then I kept drinking. Because what terrifies me most is how easy it would be to just not go. To always plan to go some other time. One by one, the days will go by, and I will stay here, and then my decade and anything I’m lucky enough to get on top of it will all be gone, and the only place left that I’ll be going will be down into the Deep Roads, and that—“ her fear rises up in her, pushing back the fog, giving her voice more clarity than it has had, “—that scares the fuck out of me, Velanna.”

Cool hands push her hair away from her forehead. “Then go. Of course they won’t hate you. I am prickly and irritable and spent my whole life being trained for something I would have been terrible at, and even _I_ loved my sister. Even _I_ know that you—” there’s a pause, a tension, “who are _stubborn_ and sometimes _stupid_ —” Solona understands that she is, by comparison to her usual approach to this subject, brushing quite gently over their disagreement about what should have been done about the Architect, “are someone worthy of… allegiance. Of course you should go and meet your siblings. They will… they will be quite fond of you, I’m sure _._ Don’t let your fear rob you of this. You have more courage than that.”

Her last conscious thought as Velanna somehow gets the sheets pulled out from under her and tucks them over her, armor and all, is, _I have courage enough for_ ** _this_** _._

 

 

It’s weeks before she’s able to leave. Mistress Woolsey insists she get approval from Weisshaupt before going, and then the Wardens there insist she wait for ranking officers to be sent to the Vigil, the implication—particularly when she considers how rarely the Wardens of Weisshaupt intervene in matters outside their immediate domain—being that leaving the arling and the Fereldan Wardens in _her_ hands is quite the concession already; they can’t actually allow the rabble to lead itself. She considers taking someone with her. In her more desperate moments, she considers taking with her the entirety of what she has come to think of as her inner circle—her first Wardens, before the slew of Joinings that followed their defense of Amaranthine, a tale passed around piecemeal until, blown out of all proportions, it has become an epic story of heroism to rival the defeat of the archdemon. In the end she and Muffin and Eluvia leave alone not because it might have been selfish of her to take any of her Wardens with her away from the keep where they can do what Wardens are meant to do, but because she has been carried through every difficult thing she’s ever done by her friends. For once, for just once, she wants to prove that she can carry herself. It’s no anxious trek through masses of roving darkspawn like her journey from Denerim—though a lingering pocket still turns up now and again, her Wardens have made good progress cutting the Blighted creatures down before them can retreat back into the Deep Roads. And where before it had not occurred to her that one ought to approach traveling alone differently than traveling with an entire band of merry misfits, this time she has the good sense to plan each day’s travel to end somewhere with an inn when possible.

The first night, when she pays the innkeeper whose eyes catch warily on the scar on her face, she thinks that this is her first time doing something new and not being an apprehensive child only playing at capability. There are still a thousand doubts plaguing her, but they are none of them the fears of a child. Even at the border with Orlais, she hardly pauses. She isn’t sure what being the Hero of Ferelden will mean here, or how much a decree from the King of Ferelden declaring her free from the Circle will be worth in Orlesian lands, but even now she isn’t afraid. She has courage enough for this.


	8. Blood's a Bar I Cannot Pass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you notice the miraculous decrease in typos, it is all thanks to the fabulous [nanahuatli](http://nanahuatli.tumblr.com/). Thank you!

She walks into the Montsimmard Circle positively buzzing with magic. Spellweaver is sheathed at her side, her favorite staff is strapped to her back, her dagger is at her thigh, she’s even wearing the focusing crystal bracelet Alistair gave her. To complete the picture, a vial of lyrium is hanging visibly at her hip, though she nearly never uses the stuff. The bitter, minerally taste, like water trickling down dark walls in the Deep Roads, turns her stomach, and it interferes with the precision of her magic, like trying to write curling script with shaking fingers. But the message is clear enough: that she has free access to what the templars must wait for the Chantry to ration out. The image she strikes is flamboyant. It is unnecessary. But she is the Hero of Ferelden, and she has spent long enough trying to make herself invisible to templars inside a Circle. Let them see her, she thinks; let them see her exactly as she is. Fearless and unfettered and _unbroken_. It was a lie the first time she put on her Warden armor. It isn’t any longer.

The templars—four, she’s flattered to discover, is the minimum number thought necessary to supervise her—show her and Muffin to what they call the visitors’ room, radiating suspicion and uncertainty, hands resting twitchily on the hilts of their swords. She doesn’t care. She wonders if Kinloch Hold had a visitors’ room like this, furnished almost comfortingly with a fireplace and large, cushioned chairs facing each other. She supposes it must, though Maker knows it was needed seldom enough. She imagines Connor and his mother in it, and it’s the first time she’s thought of Isolde without venom. She’ll never forgive the woman for her part in Alistair’s unhappiness, but the idea that, whatever she had done to try to hide it before, when the fact of her son’s magic came out, she had not disowned him… it’s impossible for that to mean nothing to Solona.

And then there’s the sound of templar armor approaching, and, _Maker_ , she isn’t ready yet. Her courage wavers. She isn’t scared anymore of men who can take away her magic, who could once have taken away her _self_ , but this, not her templar escort, but the approach of a twelve-year-old girl who Solona has never set eyes on, makes every ounce of strength in her tremble.

It isn’t until the templar leading her steps aside that she gets a look at the girl. She’s all long limbs in a way that should be gangly, but she moves, head up, shoulders back, with a grace Solona is sure she herself has never possessed. Fair hair wrapped around her head in a crown braid, the girl looks every bit the noble she would have been but for the magic they share. And even as Solona’s anxiety that the girl will have no interest in her increases, another fear unfurls.

The Circle has a way of leaving its marks no matter what, Solona understands this, but she also knows that, whatever collective fear and resentment Uldred had capitalized on to create his revolt, there are worse places than the Fereldan Circle. The girl—her sister—doesn’t cower, even in a room full of templars. She doesn’t have haunted eyes or terror shadowing her. And Solona is grateful for this. For a moment, a wave of animosity wells up that she should have to be _grateful_ that a child has not been abused, but there will be time enough for her to harbor her grudges later. Anders will understand this anger that she hadn’t even known she held. But here, now, she has only one chance to make a first impression on the girl in front of her.

When it becomes clear that the templars are going to say nothing, Solona is trying to decide how to introduce herself, not particularly helped by Muffin bumping his head into her butt to try to push her forward, when the girl speaks.

“You’re the Hero of Ferelden.”

Solona shifts, staff bumping against the chair beside her, making her feel even more graceless. “Uh… Yes.”

“Solona Amell.” The girl’s face is serene, impossible to read as her tone.

“…Yes.”

“The First Enchanter says you’re my sister.”

A deep breath. “You’re Euphemia Amell. I’m… Yes. I’m your sister.”

She stares at Solona a long moment more, eyes the pale blue of a winter morning. And then the thaw: the coolness melts into a smile, shy and sweet and warm. “You can call me Effie.”

She’s a thoughtful, quiet girl, though when Solona makes her laugh, just the once, it’s a clear, ringing sound until she presses her fingers over her lips, hushing herself. The sound and the gesture remind Solona so forcefully of her own younger self that she can almost smell the resinous vanilla of old books and the warm, melted wax scent of Kinloch Hold’s library for a moment. Effie strokes Muffin’s nose with cautious, hesitant fingers, but when the hound tries to climb into her lap with enthusiasm and Solona has to haul him back to the floor, where Solona expects distress, her expression is more like she’s trying to rein in embarrassed pleasure.

When one of the templars tells them that visiting hours are ending, the girl rises up on her toes to kiss each of Solona’s cheeks in a very Orlesian gesture that Muffin repeats as best he can on the girl herself as soon as she steps away. The expression that would otherwise be disgust is transformed by the way the corners of her mouth tug themselves upward, sleeves wiping at her face as Solona prepares herself for what she might have guessed would be the hardest part: the part where her sister walks back through the Circle while she walks away, leaving the girl there.

 

 

In Cumberland, the boy who comes bouncing into the room behind his templar escort has red curls that he has to keep shaking out of eyes alight with mischief. His gaze immediately lands on her sword.

“It’s true, then? You really wield a sword? I thought that might have been added for dramatic effect. Is that actually the one you killed the archdemon with?”

She doesn’t know from his response exactly how much he understands about who she is, but she can’t help herself. She leans towards him conspiratorially, and feels her eyes lighting up to reflect his own. In that moment, she wonders how alike they look. Could even a stranger see that they share blood as they mirror each other’s grin? “I _do_ wield a sword, and this _is_ the one that killed the archdemon. But it's not just any archdemon-killing sword. It's a _magic_ sword. Do you want to hold it?”

He’s already responding with wild enthusiasm—“Uh, do templars kill blood mages? _Yes_ , I want to hold it!”—when she catches the closest templar shifting uncomfortably and levels a look at him that says in no uncertain terms, _I dare you to tell me I can’t let him_. Behind his helmet, his eyes dart away.

“So… do you actually know who I am? I mean other than the Hero of Ferelden?”

He swishes the sword quite exuberantly through the air. “The Grand Enchanter said you’re my sister. I thought he was a bit mad, honestly. But why else would you be here?” He straightens suddenly, looking slightly abashed. “Er, sorry.” He thrusts the hand not clutching the sword toward her, grinning and putting on what she suspects is an intentionally mocking pompous voice, though the mockery doesn’t seem to be directed at her. “Ignatios Amell— _your brother_. Delighted to meet you, Messere Hero. Er, Messere of Ferelden. Er, Messere Amell.”

She laughs. “Solona. Just Solona. Although Messere of Ferelden is quite tempting.”

“I’ll save it for letters. I’m capitalizing the O though. I mean,” he ducks his head, suddenly bashful, “I can write to you, right? Not that anything interesting ever happens here to tell you about, but—”

“Yes! Yes. You can write. I’d like that. I’d like that quite a lot.”

He hesitates, the bashfulness not quite gone. “And you could, you know, write back. If you wanted.”

She has only to nod before he grins again suddenly. “You could write in darkspawn blood! Will you tell me all about them? The darkspawn? How gruesome and horrifying them are? Spare no details. I can handle it. I’m thirteen, you know.”

Beside her, Muffin whines once and paws at the air. Ignatios understands the gesture even before she does, immediately adopting his put-on pompousness again and grasping the waving paw. “Excuse me, Messere Mabari. Do forgive my appalling manners.”

When he whines again, she’s faster to understand, laughing as she translates, “He says you can call him Muffin.”

Though he’s hardly quit smiling since he entered the room, the one he gives them both now is as familiar as it is brilliant. It is her own.

For all that they share the same smile, as the words and laughter tumble out of his mouth, it’s someone else entirely that he reminds her of. He seems like the kind of boy who would scream in a silent Chantry just to see who would come running. And she cannot help that he is all the dearer to her for it.

 

 

The girl who enters the Starkhaven visitors’ room is… tiny, smaller even than Solona thinks a ten-year-old should be. Despite that Solona has never been diminutive like this, the little girl bears the most striking resemblance to herself of any of the siblings she’s met, encouraged in no small part by the fact that the girl’s red hair is pinned up in the same twin buns Solona herself wore for so long.

The girl stops still and her eyes go wide the moment she sees Solona.

She smiles gently, trying to put the girl at ease. Perhaps for this, the youngest of her siblings, she should have made an effort to tone down the image of intimidation she’s gone out of her way to make explicit. Perhaps she should have left Spellweaver at the inn. Perhaps she should have left Muffin there as well, she thinks, catching him by the collar as he strains towards the child. “Hi. You’re Phoebe, right? I’m Solona.”

It’s only when the girl’s mouth opens and the hushed words, “You’re _her_ ,” come out that Solona understands what’s made her stop still isn’t terror. It’s awe. And then, just as hushed, “Your hair is different.”

Solona touches her hair, confused, not at what the girl is talking about but at how she could know. “Different from wha…” Solona’s voice drifts off as she watches the girl pull out something tucked into the front of her robes: a leather-bound book that falls open easily to a page in the back that the girl holds up to her.

“Did they draw it wrong? Or do you only wear it like that sometimes?”

“I… I wore it like that during the Blight.”

She’s caught off guard—which Muffin takes immediate advantage of to brush past her and throw himself at the girl’s feet, rolling onto his back in the way that always makes Solona unable to resist rubbing his belly. It appears to have the same effect on her sister, who looks up at her with hopeful eyes. “Can I _pet_ him?”

She nods absently, taking the book before the girl falls to her knees next to Muffin. Of course she should have known that one day there would be books about her, but to be greeted with it here, like this… She studies the illustration. It is of herself, standing over the archdemon, sword through its skull, and though both are depicted, she is clearly the true subject of the illustration. Urthemiel has been rendered in only enough detail to suggest that she has defeated something ferocious and powerful—the dull grey he’s shaded with looks faded already, though the rest of the colors in the illustration are vibrant, from the red of her hair to the blue of her armor to the golden glow emanating all around her. She cannot quite stop a small snort from making its way out. She looks like a red-headed Andraste. She cannot believe that a Circle would spend its funds procuring a book that dares to depict a mage so. And then something worse occurs to her, as she glances at the templars around them. She cannot believe that this Circle would allow its mages to take any book so brightly illustrated—no inexpensive acquisition—out of the library. Her fingers tighten on the book as she looks down at the girl who has surely never seen a dog before, not since she was brought here at least, giggling as Muffin bends himself in half to lick her wrists while she rubs his belly.

“Phoebe… are you… are you _allowed_ to have this out of the library?”

The girl’s face lights up, brighter than the pigment on the page as she rises. Muffin rises with her, determinedly keeping his head butted up against her fingers. “It’s _mine_. There’s a copy for the library too. But this one is _mine_. The Knight-Commander wanted to take it away, but the First Enchanter argued with him. He said it was _meant_ for _me_.” She tugs Solona’s hands down enough to allow her to turn the pages back to the beginning. “See, it’s got my _name_.” And then, more quietly, “…And yours too.”

And so it does, an inscription that reads simply, _For Phoebe Amell, sister of Solona Amell, Hero of Ferelden,_ in the same hand that has addressed every one of the growing stack of disregarded invitations that lie in a drawer in her room at the Vigil, the same hand that made notes on the map that led them through the Blight. Something inside her aches at the sight of it, and then her temper pricks at the pain. Every time she thinks she’s taken a step beyond the place where the thought of Alistair still hurts, she finds herself tangling in another string that ties her back to him. _How dare he_ , she thinks, tie himself to her sister too, as though there aren’t enough places that her heart is sure to trip over him on its own.

And then Phoebe pulls the book gently out of her hands and hugs it to her with exquisite happiness. “I’ve never had anything that was _mine_ before except my shoes. This is _way better_ than shoes.” She tilts her cheek to press it against the side of the book, and in that moment Solona’s anger breaks, and she finds that she loves the man who understood what it is to have nothing and gave this to her sister—not just a book, but a story and hope and pride—every bit as painfully, impossibly much as she ever has.

 

 

The Antivan Circle is, in its way, the most depressing that she’s visited. For a country whose city streets are full of bright colors, with music trickling out of every other window, its Circle is… quite as still and colorless as every other. The last and oldest of her siblings, at fifteen, is marched into the visitors’ room between two templars, one in front and one behind.

Before her, he crosses his arms, already surly expression darkening into a glare. “Who are you supposed to be?”

Well. That’s… a decidedly different kind of greeting. For a moment she hesitates, wrong footed, until something in the press of the boy’s lips makes her think of how many times, in the interest of self-preservation, she’s pretended to be someone harder and stronger and more fearless than she was. Her posture relaxes as she offers the boy a smile. “I’m supposed to be the Hero of Ferelden, but you can call me Solona.”

His arms tighten across his chest as he looks at the templars around him and then back at her with one brow raised. “Right.”

She doesn’t even know how to respond. “You… don’t believe me?”

His expression doesn’t change. “No.”

She can’t help herself. She laughs.

His brows draw further together. “You look like a walking armory. The templars would never let a _mage_ in here like _that_. Especially not one with… _that_.” He gestures warily toward Muffin.

She grins. “Special concessions. Like I said,” she gestures to herself, “Hero of Ferelden.”

He still looks skeptical, so she holds a hand out, concentrating, pulling gently at the Fade. Delicate. After all, she doesn’t want to alarm the templars too much. Just something small, like laying her palm against the surface of water without breaking it… there. The globe of ice, thin as paper, seals itself in her palm and begins to flicker as tiny flashes of electricity light up inside it. She may have been rubbish at healing, but in the time since she and her Wardens killed the Architect—largely at Anders encouragement—she has come to realize just how gifted she is with ice and lightning. Anyone with fingers capable of dipping into the Fade can freeze a man solid or stop his heart with a burst of energy, but _this_ is no mean feat. This kind of precision—Anders says it's art. Maybe it is. Even she can appreciate the beauty, can see the pity of all those wasted years too afraid of being watched and seen in the Circle to dare.

The boy’s brows slowly relax into a more neutral position. “All right.”

She laughs again. “Andraste’s tears, but you’re a reticent thing, aren’t you?”

He shrugs. “Why are you… _here_?”

“Because I’m Solona Amell. Because you’re Galen Amell. Because I’m your sister.”

One brow raises again. “There _are_ other people with the same last name. That doesn’t automatically make us related.”

“No, but I think having the same mother _does_.”

The look of surliness sweeps over his face again. “You can’t know that.”

The sound Muffin makes can only be described as a groan.

Though this is the first of her siblings to require such proof—the first who hasn’t _already_ known about their relation—she has the official Chantry papers that Alistair gave to her all those months ago, and she pulls them out now, handing them to her brother. “I can, actually.”

As they speak, she eventually begins to coax more than one or two word answers from him. He even smiles at her once, an expression that transforms his face, and it’s only then that she realizes he might actually be even prettier than Effie.

When it’s time for her to leave, she only holds a hand out when she wants to hug him, because he’s reserved and moody, and she doesn’t want to upset him, but he pushes it aside, wrapping his arms around with a crushing pressure that she can still feel after he’s gone, after she’s demanded to speak to the Knight-Commander and he finally arrives.

She glares, an expression not unlike Galen’s when he stepped into the room. “The King of Ferelden sent my brother a book. Why hasn’t it been given to him?”

She says this like it isn’t a bluff, like she knows it is so. But she does, really. Because she knows Alistair. And he wouldn’t have sent a gift to one of her siblings and not the rest. Nor is her lack of fear a bluff. No one will ever be again what Knight-Commander Greagoir was to her once. She isn’t afraid. And even if she were, she would face any fear on her brother’s behalf.

The Knight-Commander grimaces. “The book is being studied. It wouldn’t do to give a mage a book that might inspire ideas of sedition.”

“That book is the story of the defeat of the Fifth Blight. Was stopping a Blight from wreaking havoc on all of Thedas an act to inspire _sedition_ just because it was accomplished by a mage?” She snorts. “You know what, that doesn’t even matter. Let’s be blunt, shall we? Do you know why you’re going to give that book to my brother? Because, unlike him, unlike all of the mages stuck here under your thumb, I’m going to leave here. And, even worse for you, when I leave here, people are going to listen to what I say. And if I say that the Antivan Circle is a travesty, a mockery of what the Circle system should be, that its Knight-Commander is cruel and takes joy in the repression of mages… how long do you think it will be before there’s public outcry against you? Don’t misunderstand what kind of power I wield, templar. I’m not just some mage with too much magic for her own good, dangerous, capable of killing an archdemon, who’d be better off under your watchful eye. I’m a mage with a _voice_. You have no idea what kind of power that is now, but if I find out you’ve been unfair to my brother, you’ll learn. Give him the fucking book.”

She wonders for just an instant if he might Smite her for such insolence. _Let him if he dares_. Because it is all she can give the brother she can’t take with her, she walks away without looking back.


	9. With More Than Mortal Ire

The guard at the Vigil’s gate sounds the horn, announcing her presence, before she has a chance to stop him. She can only sigh. She’d have preferred to arrive without fanfare. She’s only passed a handful of people when she understands that something is terribly wrong. Voldrik and the pair of soldiers working on a section of wall with him watch her solemnly, silently, work halted as she passes. The dwarf isn’t given to meaningless smiles, but the weight of his expression is heavy, even for him.

Trepidation rises in her. It had not occurred to her to worry for her keep or her Wardens while she was gone. She had not thought her role here particularly hard to fill. The man who’d come to take her place had seemed serious, reserved, grisled. In every way, really, more what she expected a Warden-Commander to be than herself. What had there been to be concerned about? And yet, something dire has happened, she is certain.

At the keep’s steps, people are filing out. Lieutenant Henrik, who had replaced her, walks forward while Nathaniel, Sigrun, and Velanna follow. Behind them trail a stream of newer recruits. The three of them are openly glaring at the back of the man leading them. It’s an expression she could have overlooked entirely from Velanna, one that would only have made her wonder in passing from Sigrun, but from Nathaniel, who understands protocol and propriety, who grasps on every level what it means to disrespect a commanding officer publicly, to see a look dangerous as a hail of arrows directed at the Lieutenant in front of everyone makes her blood run cold. She eyes the crowd gathering. Oghren, Anders, and Justice are nowhere to be found. She tenses for a moment, then forces herself to unclench. Alistair always told her the best way to take a blow was to relax into it.

If the look Lieutenant Henrik directed at her when he stepped into her keep before she left was one of suspicion, the look he gives her now is condemnation.

“Warden-Commander. You’ll forgive the lack of felicity at your arrival. We are dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy. Four Wardens are dead.”

Nathaniel’s nostrils flare, and he has to fix his eyes on the horizon, muscles cording in his arms. Velanna’s lips curl tighter, and the faintest quiver runs through the ground beneath Solona’s feet. Sigrun’s eyes take on a far away look, and a feral smile twists at her face. Solona is certain that in the dwarf’s imagination someone is dying a most gruesome death.

 _Relax into it. The harder you resist, the more it’s going to hurt_. She exhales slowly. “Anders? Oghren? Justice?”

The contempt on the man’s face sharpens, his sneer so curled that his lips are visible beneath the grey mustache. “Unfortunately, the apostate who used his camaraderie to blind you all to the fact that he owed this Order no loyalty survived the tragedy. The spirit--as will hardly surprise anyone with their right mind about them--is acting as his accomplice. The dwarf is merely locked in his rooms until he regains his sense.”

Suddenly Nathaniel is stepping forward. “Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. He called the templars, Solona. He was going to hand Anders over to them.”

The Lieutenant's expression is as dismissive as his voice. “The man was unstable, a liability to the Wardens. What he did when confronted proves it. Twelve men died, the flesh scorched from their bones! Three of those Wardens didn’t even know what was going on!”

Suddenly Nathaniel’s face settles into the look of cool detachment she’s more familiar with, and it’s only when he speaks that she realizes he has not gained control of his temper. That isn’t what this is at all. This is the last mad grab, caught at the end of his fingers. “Get him out of here, Commander. He has no idea how close we all are to agreeing with Oghren’s opinion on what should be done with him. Send him away with his life before he is relieved of it.”

Still spinning from the blow that doesn’t quite hurt yet, but Maker knows it will, she just nods. “Get out of my keep. Go while you can.”

 

 

Letting Oghren out of his room is an ordeal in and of itself. She ends up with a bloody lip before he can even be calmed enough to understand who she is. As she wipes the blood from her face, thinking how Anders would already be stepping forward to heal it if he were here, in an effort to hold together a thing she isn’t ready to have break open yet, she laughs.When Nathaniel catches her eye, he gives her a smile, and though there’s no joy in it, there is sympathy beneath the irony, and a note of bitter amusement in his voice when he speaks. “Welcome home, Commander.”

The laugh leaves her in a hard gust of air. She catches so hard on the word, “home,” that it takes an act of will to stay still where she stands. Because she had found a home once, and she had known at the finding it wouldn’t last, but she had not expected to find another. Of all the people she would not have expected to make a gift of this name to christen this place, for it to be _Nathaniel_ , for whom this keep has _always_ been _home_ , up until she took it away… She has to reach out and grip the doorway to keep herself from running forward and throwing her arms around his neck. Because for the first time in her life she _has a home_ that isn’t one impossible, inevitable deed away from falling apart around her, a home where she isn’t going to have to watch anyone else she cares about walk away from her again.

She won’t have to watch anyone else walk away, if she can just let go of the image of Anders’ and Justice’s retreating backs.

 

 

When she finds the grocer in Amaranthine that Anders, having been told that the cat was a distraction, an impediment to him fulfilling his duties as a Grey Warden, had left Ser Pounce-a-lot with, she offers the man an entire sovereign to take the cat back. He stares at her, dumbstruck before he manages to find his voice. “My lady, you stopped a Blight, and you saved this city. I owe you my life twice over. I’ll hardly charge you to have back a cat that belonged to one of yours to begin with.”

Without Anders’ shoulder to ride on, the cat takes to riding around on Muffin. At night, he will only sleep on her pillow, and only once he’s pawed her hair into an appropriate nest. The idea of him doing the same to Anders makes her smile until she thinks of him now, with only Justice, who understands so little about human comfort. She knows that, even if she had not left her keep, had not allowed in the man who is responsible for what happened to Anders, he would not have stayed forever. That night on the battlements, for all that he had not yet committed to it, she had seen it in his eyes. He was already halfway gone. She wishes now he had been able to take his cat with him. Or maybe, she thinks, rubbing under Pounce’s chin as he curls further into her hair, what she feels is gratitude to have another creature along with Muffin who she needs never worry will leave her.

And then she receives the letter from Aura, thanking her for returning her husband’s body to her at last. As the implications race through her mind, she finds herself leaning over her desk, heart racing. _Maker have mercy. Anders,_ ** _what have you done_** _?_

 

 

At every turn, for weeks, she expects some terrible news to reach her. What Anders and Justice have done, it can only end in misery. It takes weeks of silence, weeks of steady routine, for her to begin to forget her fear.

She’s just finished training the newest recruits out in the yard--there could be an emissary hidden in any group of darkspawn, she knows too well, and they have to be prepared for what it feels like to have a sheet of ice spread over their skin, to know how fast a fireball can come flying at their heads--when Sigrun comes running toward her.

She holds something out, worry all over her face, voice breathless. “It just came.”

Solona unrolls the paper handed to her, and, with an image of her tiniest sister, hair bunned, book clutched to her chest, the world drops out from under her so fast she doesn’t know how she doesn’t end up on her knees.

_The Circle in Starkhaven has burned._

_They’re relocating the mages to Kirkwall for the time being._

_All mages not accounted for yet._

_Will send more as soon as I know._

_May the Maker watch over your sister._

_Wynne_


	10. For Even the Least Division of an Hour

She's buckling Eluvia’s saddle in place, unsure what she's planning, knowing it will be impossible for any further messages from Wynne to reach her on the road, but unable to sit uselessly waiting to find out if her sister even still lives, when a familiar voice, sweet and lilting despite the concern clear in it, calls out her name. Without a thought, she's turning and running toward the sound, and it's only Leliana’s agility that keeps the two from collapsing in a heap of tangled limbs when Solona collides with her.

“It’s all right. Solona, she’s all right.”

For the first time since reading the message Wynne sent to her, the tension leaves her, until she’s clinging to her friend, and the only parts of her not limply hanging from Leliana are her arms, tight around the former bard’s waist, and her face, pressed against her shoulder.

“There’s nothing for you to do. Your sister is among the mages being transferred to Kirkwall. She is… she’ll be okay.”

Solona can almost hear the word Leliana cannot bring herself to say. _Safe_. And this slip from a woman who always has the right words, words so slick they can’t be held onto long enough to test the truth of, brings home the terror that, in her more immediate concern for her sister, she has not yet faced.

“They call it the _Gallows_ , Leliana. I mean, it’s true enough in any Circle, isn’t it? They balance us all on a wooden beam, and one wrong move is as good as a rope around the neck, but, _for Maker’s sake_ , they _call_ it the Gallows. I have to go see her.”

Leliana’s arms tighten around her until Solona thinks the woman intends to hold her here by force if she must. “The way you visited the other Circles? Armed to the teeth, dangling lyrium under the templars’ noses, daring them to reproach you? Maker’s breath, if the people knew the line you tread between _hero_ and _fool_ … The kind of attention you’d call down _there_ would do neither of you any good. I have contacts that can deliver a letter to her without it passing through templar hands. Send her a phrase, something innocuous, that she can write to you if something is wrong. There’s nothing good you can accomplish by going there, Solona.”

They stand there in the stable, arms around one another for a long time. She can practically feel Leliana willing her to heed her words as she fights her way through the flood of arguments that rise up in her. Finally, she sags even further against the woman holding her up. “If she sends word that something is wrong, there is _nothing under the sun_ that will stop me from going to her, Leliana.”

 

 

Leliana stays with her for a handful of days. On the second night, in front of the fire in Solona’s room, they are talking quietly, heads close together as Leliana works her way through a bottle of mead that Solona cannot bear to join her in when every sip tastes of memories it’s easier to forget. Leliana is telling her about the woman she has been working with since leaving Solona, Revered Mother Dorothea, who is well placed to be the next Divine once Beatrix, ancient, doddering, one foot already in the grave, finally settles the other there with it. She suddenly looks Solona hard in the eyes, and she can see a fire there as bright as the awe with which Leliana had looked at the Urn of Sacred Ashes. “I will do whatever I must to see her on the Sunburst Throne. Solona, if she takes it-- _when she takes it_ \--she’s going to make things _right_. Can you _imagine_? Can you imagine what a good woman who isn’t afraid could accomplish with that power?”

Solona has to look away, cannot meet her eyes as she answers. “Of course I can imagine. Do you know whom you’re talking to? I wagered the dearest piece of my own heart on the idea of what the world might be with power in hands that wield it with decency. As though it were a game of cards. As though I had the right to gamble away someone else’s happiness along with my own.”

Leliana is still staring at her when Solona finally meets her eyes again. “When Dorothea is done, the world will be a place where such faith is rewarded, not punished.”

Solona laughs softly, and it ends on a wistful sigh. “I don’t think _my_ faith has ever been the same thing as yours, Leliana.”

The look in Leliana’s eyes becomes even fiercer. “Do you think it matters so very much what name you call the light when you risk everything to carry it into the dark corners? Your faith is worthy.”

She cannot help the snort that escapes her. “Worthy of what? Being carried back through time and given a third choice of whom to place on Ferelden’s throne, neither the conniving manipulator with no empathy nor the boy too soft and too sweet to take the double edged blade without cutting himself on it? What’s done is done. Even the Maker can’t change that. All that’s left is to live with it.”

Once, she thinks, these words would have all but broken her. Leliana must see that, now, they are the immovable pillar on which she braces herself, because, though Solona can read her disagreement clearly on her face, when she speaks again, her voice is lulling, and she has changed the subject entirely.

 

 

For a girl who has hardly ever written a letter in her life, Solona finds it becoming an activity that breaks her days down into pieces so manageable that they slide by whole weeks at a time. She writes to Phoebe and to Ignatios, Galen, and Effie. She writes to Leliana and to Zevran, to Sten; she writes letters jointly addressed to Wynne and Shale. She helps Oghren write to the son he fled from when he found out Felsi was pregnant. She writes letters she cannot send to Morrigan.

She is thinking of everything in these letters that she has never been able to say to the woman who both betrayed her and saved her when word reaches her that the witch has been seen in the Wilds near Flemeth’s hut.

With the help of a Dalish named Ariane who makes her wonder if a dangerously sharp exterior with a fierce loyalty hidden beneath it are traits common to _all_ their people, or just her and Velanna, and a boy she hardly remembers from the Circle, even more naive than she herself came out of the place, Solona and Muffin find Morrigan an instant from stepping through a magical mirror and disappearing all over again.

As Muffin bounds forward and Morrigan bends, empty handed, to greet him with a smile that says more softly than she would ever admit, _Oh, you fool_ , Solona feels her heart drop. She had not realized how desperately she had wanted to see the child until she understood it was not here.

When Morrigan rises and says, “No further, please,” with a false lightness that carries beneath it a terrible weight, Solona’s heart aches even more fiercely. The witch expects condemnation. Perhaps she even truly believes Solona has come here to kill her. And though this is a better reason than any to halt, Solona finds that she can’t, even knowing that two steps could take the woman out of Solona’s grasp maybe forever. Though Morrigan flinches when Solona’s arms rise to circle her shoulders, she doesn’t flee.

“Thank you. _Thank you_ , and you had _no right_ , and I’m sorry, and _thank you_.”

“I… I told you that you are my friend. Perhaps you didn’t understand what that means to a woman who has never had one. I _told_ you that you would _live_.”

When she finally pulls away, she makes herself meet Morrigan’s eyes. “I just… The child… tell me the child is just a child, Morrigan.”

Though her shoulders draw back defiantly, there is something more tender than Solona has ever seen on her face. “He is not _just_ a child. He is _my_ child. But he is innocent, if that’s what you ask.”

“And…” Solona continues, “if there’s a price to be paid… _I’m_ the one who lived. Let _me_ be the one to pay it. Swear to me, Morrigan. Swear you won’t use this against _him_.”

“The things I seek cannot be _dreamed_ of by those who squabble over thrones. I assure you the only thing I will _ever_ ask of Alistair was to save your life. There are no more prices to be paid by _either_ of you.”

There is too much to say and not enough time to say it all, and when she knows Morrigan will wait no longer all she can do is hold out the bundle of letters she had never thought would be delivered, and hope that they will say for her anything she has not.

 

 

Between and amongst all the letters that do get sent, she continues writing to Morrigan, though she has no better way to send them now than before she tracked her down in the Dragonbone Wastes. It is only when she is placing another undeliverable letter in the drawer where she keeps them that she realizes the invitations from Alistair have stopped. There are surely as many balls and galas and political gatherings as there have ever been, but it has been months since another invitation was added to her stack. A dozen reasons why race through her mind.  Perhaps he has met someone and any day now she’ll receive an announcement of the upcoming royal wedding. Perhaps being King has made him so miserable he has finally decided he hates her for what she’s done to him. Perhaps he was caught sending one to her by Eamon and is now under constant surveillance. Perhaps he’s simply accepted that it’s time to let her go.

She sorts the reasons into those that please her and those that do not, just to prepare herself, so she will know what to feel when the truth comes. Though it’s an act like hammering a square peg into a round hole, she is determined to force his potential engagement in amongst those that please her. _If he has found someone who brings him happiness, you_ will not grudge him it _. I_ will not allow _you to._ If every time Sigrun brings her some bit of parchment, she has to beat back a wild thing that rises in her chest, that does not mean she has been unsuccessful, she promises herself.

Her promise falters when Sigrun finds her on a day halfway through Bloomingtide. _He would not_ , she thinks. He wouldn’t send her such news on her _name day_.

But Sigrun is empty handed, her expression one of pure delight. “I think you just got a name day gift. It’s… it’s pretty amazing.”

Not a wedding announcement then. Unduly relieved, she laughs. “What is it?”

“You… I think you’ve got to see this for yourself.”

In the entrance hall she recognizes the man standing at attention by the door as the Captain of the Palace guard in Denerim. She cannot help thinking that the last time she saw the man she is sure she caused him a great deal of grief, and he cannot be pleased about being sent out as a delivery boy for whatever gift Alistair has, despite his silence over the last months, procured for her now.

And yet all the man bears is an envelope, and she’s struggling to understand what Sigrun found so amazing when there’s a blur of red beside her and her name in a child’s voice, and this time the shock her sister gives her does bring her to her knees.

“ _Phoebe_? But… _how_?”

“It was amazing! There was a secret passage _right under_ the Gallows, and there was an apostate who uses it to run--he calls it the Mage Underground, and it’s amazing because it’s _right there_ under their feet and they don’t even know! The really scary part was that I had to get on the ship all by myself. But he said, ‘I bet you’re brave,” and I told him, ‘I’m as brave as the Hero of Ferelden.’ And he said he _knew_ you, and he just bet I was, and I even looked like you, and I wanted to tell him it’s because we’re sisters, but the note said not to tell _anyone_ , so I didn’t. And then when the ship docked I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and I was just standing there, and then someone said, ‘Well, that makes it easy. You really do look just like your sister, you know,’ and…” For the first time since she launched into her tale, her Starkhaven accent thick with her enthusiasm, the girl pauses, her flush of excitement suddenly turning a brighter shade of pink. “He’s _nice_ , you know. The… well, he said to call him Alistair. And he’s got a really nice smile. And he said I didn’t have to go back to the Circle. _Ever_. Is… is it true?”

She’s barely managed to keep up with everything out of the girl’s mouth, and it takes a moment to realize she’s waiting for an answer. “I… yes. Yes, it’s true. Sweet Maker, bless that man, _yes_. It’s true.”

Later, sitting in a chair, watching her sister and Muffin sleep in her bed, she reads the letter sent along with the papers declaring Phoebe free of the Circle. 

 

> _Solona,_
> 
> _Leliana said I should give you time and space. She has lots of arrows and knives and is much cleverer than I am, so I didn’t argue._
> 
> _In news you might find interesting, I very nearly punched Eamon the other day. Maker knows how he even found out what I’d done, but he said to me (rather sourly, I might add, because I am not_ quite _so imbecilic I can’t pick up on that), “That’s some name day gift, isn’t it?”_
> 
> _It never ceases to amaze me that the man who is supposed to be the brains behind this throne can be so ludicrously incapable of understanding the simplest things. Like that a human being is not a gift to be given or received._
> 
> _Maker’s breath, woman, if you were going to leave an idiot and an ass in charge of the country, you might just as well have let the archdemon have it._
> 
> _...Though to be fair, by_ kingly _standards, I am evidently quite sagacious. I know how to put on my own trousers! It is quite the sign of accomplishment around here to not require someone to dress you like a toddler, you know._
> 
> _You could at least write. I know you write to the others. And I’m certain they don’t miss you half so much as I do._

There’s a mark on the parchment as though the quill sat there for some time before, without a closing, he signed the letter. And she understands why. What can he say? “Yours?” “Always?” They’re all words that have already proven worthless.


	11. Swing Your Soul Like a Broken Bell

That winter the food shortages are the worst they’ve been. There are still whole swathes of land too tainted to bear a full harvest. After everything being stretched thin for two years, there is nothing left saved. The granaries are empty.

Maker, but acorn stew is disgusting. She didn’t eat this poorly during the Blight itself.

It occurs to her once that the Circles, provided for by the Chantry, always the last to feel the effects of any shortage, are surely not suffering so. She thinks for a moment that if her already too small sister were still in one, she wouldn't be going without enough to eat at every meal. And then she reminds herself of every whisper she's ever heard about the Gallows, of exactly what having enough to eat might have cost her sister.

When Solona tells her Wardens she wants to open the dining hall doors to any who bring a handful of something edible for the pot--roots, grasses, nuts, bark--they look at her like she’s mad.

“They’re starving _because of the Blight._  This is what we _do._  We protect _against the Blight_.”

It does, at least, end the rumors that the Arlessa is sitting her fancy keep feasting while her people starve.

When word comes of the riot in Denerim’s Alienage, she isn’t surprised. What does surprise her is how it is ended--though perhaps it should be the thing that surprises her least of all.

The entirety of the Palace’s Satinalia feast is sent to the Alienage.

They say the Chancellor had ridden out of the Palace gates shortly before the wagons of food, face grim and hard as stone, that he didn’t return for a week.

They say the King himself helped unload the wagons that delivered the food.

They say that he stood there in front of angry elves, armed with swords and bows they had been outlawed from bearing less than two years before, and cracked a joke about an arrow in the chest not being the kind of _heartfelt_ Satinalia gift he’d been hoping for.

What she hears in every word they say is this: that she was right. That she was right about Alistair, that she was right about the world he’ll make. That he has survived the fire that burned away the boy who did not know how to tell Eamon _no._

By spring the rumors are everywhere about the dispute between the King and the Chantry. He has declared the Fereldan Circle free of their rule, autonomous. They--because it is certainly not the Divine herself, too senile to even understand what is happening, only some vague conglomeration of Revered Mothers among whom Dorothea’s voice is to singular and too small to change the tone--have insisted he has no authority to do so. And she knows, without a quiet voice second guessing her for the first time, that leaving him crying in the rain that night was right. Because she is so proud of what he has become without her, of what he could never have been with her. They would use her against him. _We see what this is about. It is not about what is fair or what the mages have proven themselves worthy of. It’s about the whore who warms your bed._ They would use her to make him bend. _We will put her back in the Circle where she belongs. You have to right to keep her from it for your own pleasure._ They would use her to stir animosity towards him. _He puts her ahead of you, his own people, and she a_ mage _. Will you stand for it?_

Without her to use, they have no power over him. His people love their King who drinks in their taverns with them and is as quick--quicker perhaps--to talk to the lowest among them as he is their nobles.

She does not know how to tell him about her pride or her gratitude. It has no place in the letters she has sent since Phoebe arrived, formal, obligatory, as brief and brusque as the reports she’d once felt compelled to send to Weisshaupt before they had revealed themselves to her for what they are. Perhaps it’s crueler than not writing at all, but he gave her Phoebe, and this is all he asked, and if she writes as a friend, he will come, and seeing him will bring back up everything she has buried, and she does not know how she will survive it.

It is how she responds to every way in which he tries to reach out to her. She navigates the cannots until she comes to what is left beyond them. When he invites her to the celebration to honor the anniversary of the end of the Blight, and she cannot go, and she cannot ignore the note he’s included-- _Please. Maker, please just come_ \--she sends Nathaniel and Sigrun.

When they return to her, Sigrun’s face set stubbornly and Nathaniel wearing a resignation that sits suspiciously like guilt, she has to coax the story from them in bits and pieces.

How Sigrun had wondered on the way why Solona did not go herself. How Nathaniel, his tongue loosened by trust in his companion before it occurred to him that Solona’s secrets were not his to reveal, had muttered something about the King breaking her heart. And if the truth is more complicated, maybe more like the opposite, with nothing more to go on, it had not occurred to Sigrun, fiercely loyal as she is.

And so Sigrun had passed the evening sending withering looks at the man who she was given to understand had broken her friend’s heart. It could have passed without incident. Even when the King approached, and Sigrun had refused to speak to him in anything other than icy stares and single syllable snorts as Nathaniel tried to cover for her rudeness, it could have gone without more than passing note. But then the King had done what was, to Sigrun, the unforgivable. Rather than retreating from her glare, he’d chatted amicably. He’d had the nerve to be... likable. And then, gravest insult of all, he’d dared to make her laugh. There’d been a look of triumph from him at the sound before Sigrun’s face had crumpled with horror, and the next thing Nathaniel knew, she was _yelling_ at the King, there in front of every dignitary and diplomat in attendance. When her fists had come up, Nathaniel had had to drag her from the Palace before she got herself arrested.

It isn’t until the next invitation comes that Alistair addresses the incident, in small script at the bottom. _You can even bring the dwarf. I like her. She’s… spunky. Just please don’t send her without you. I’m a little terrified of having to face her again without having you to hide behind like a child._

When she’s eliminated what she cannot say, there is nothing left to say at all. She’s proud, and she’s grateful, and she’s sorry, and there is nothing to say.

It’s Phoebe who distracts her best from all that she cannot say. The girl takes to drawing pictures to be sent along with Solona’s letters to Galen, Effie, and Ignatios, and surprises herself with the gift she has for it. She draws the Vigil, capturing it simultaneously as haggard and as hulking as it stands against a cloud darkened sky. She draws Velanna in a copse of trees whose limbs sway toward her; she draws Sigrun at the edge of the ocean; she draws Nathaniel, the concentration on his face and the tension in his bow the moment before the arrow flies; she draws the gleam in Oghren’s eyes as he leans toward the viewer so precisely that just the image gives Solona the urge to cover her sister’s ears. She draws Muffin, tongue lolling against Solona’s cheek as she grimaces and grins, Muffin sprawled across Solona’s pillow, drooling, Muffin beside the Vigil’s small throne with a daisy chain crown.

Her mabari is the only one she will entrust her sister’s safety to when she must leave the Vigil to deal with darkspawn. The first time she tries to leave him behind, he has a fit, barking at her with a ferocity that terrifies even some of the Wardens who know his gentle nature. It’s only when Phoebe joins him in trying to convince Solona to take the dog, chin rising with a stubborn bravery, that he finally relents. With a look that suggests he thinks she’s used the girl against him intentionally, he clomps over to the child, licks her hand once, and flops at her feet in way that clearly indicates his displeasure. He relents because they are agreed in one thing--Phoebe may well be capable of taking care of herself--she doesn’t like fire or lightning, but she’s good with ice, and she has a deft hand for the Dalish earth magic that Velanna teaches her with surprising willingness--but they are determined she will never be left to prove it to anyone. After the first fight, it becomes routine. She leaves them at the gate, and when she returns, they greet her far beyond it, racing toward her the moment she can be seen on the horizon. Despite everything she has given up to make it this far, despite the siblings that are not with them, it is somehow a more complete life than she ever expected.

 

 

“Sigrun says Alistair is an arsehole.”

Solona freezes where she sits behind her sister, fingers full of hair as she divides it into a series of braids that come together in an intricate pattern. It isn’t the first time her sister has tried to talk to her about Alistair since she arrived the year before. At least like this the girl can’t study her with curious eyes. Fingers moving again before she manages a response, she finally mutters, “I’m going to seal your ears up with wax,” hoping it doesn’t sound like the diversion it is.

Phoebe ignores her. “He isn’t though. I mean, he wasn’t to me. He was _nice._  And I asked her _why_ , and Nate said because he made her laugh, but” she tries to turn, hair slipping in Solona’s fingers until she moves with it, “that doesn’t make any sense. That’s like… a Velanna answer. Sigrun likes to laugh.” She fixes Solona with a wide eyed look somewhere between troubled and perplexed. “I don’t get it.”

It isn’t even a question. And yet there’s something just a little beseeching in the expression, and something utterly vulnerable in the way she waits for Solona to respond. As with every conundrum she brings to her sister, the girl is certain Solona will know the answer and will explain. Her faith is a heavy thing, but when the weight of it settles, it doesn’t feel like a burden.

With only a sigh to signal her surrender, Solona considers how to explain in a way that will close the conversation as quickly as possible.

“Because she didn’t understand that I’m the one who broke _his_ heart. She had it all backwards.”

At this, Phoebe tugs her hair free of her sister’s fingers and turns fully, blue eyes so wide now that they dominate her face entirely.

Solona sighs again, hands falling to her lap. She’ll probably have to start all of the braids over now.

“ _You_ … You and _him_ … and then you… but he’s…” The girl’s hands come up to make a gesture that Solona can only guess is supposed to mean tall, or maybe broad shouldered. “...and…” The gesture she makes now is even vaguer, rather flourished, and it is only familiarity with both her sister and the subject of the conversation that allow her any clue what is being suggested at all. _Beautiful_. “ _Why_ would you..?”

She has to look away from her sister. She thinks suddenly of Alistair, his hands coming up to cover his eyes as he laughs. _Don’t look at me like_ that _;_ _it’s not fair._  “Because I had to choose. I could have him, or I could do my part to make the world a better, more fair place. I couldn’t have both.”

Phoebe just stares at her for a long moment. It isn’t the first time she’s done it, but it still surprises Solona how a girl who can babble like she does can weigh her words so carefully when she understands how much they matter.

“But that _isn’t_ _fair_.” Phoebe’s voice is hushed and heavy.

“Oh, sweetheart.” She pulls her sister against her, cheek settling against the girl’s hair where the braids are already unwinding, and is surprised to find that, for all her own pain, her heart hurts worse for the girl in her arms than for herself. All of the sorrow she feels for both of them is in her voice when she speaks. “Few things in life are.”

Phoebe sniffles hard against her chest, but when she says, “Well, maybe life _should_ be fair,” the words are unwavering and fierce.

“I know. I know it should. That’s why I gave him up.”

 


	12. A Breach In the Walls, a Broken Gate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With enormous gratitude to [celeritaassagittae](https://celeritassagittae.tumblr.com/) for generously helping me with this mess into shape.
> 
> Also, just in case anyone didn't see this in the summary: A) Im not dead! B) My sincerest apologies for my long absence and silence. I’m in the process of responding to all of the wonderful, beautiful people who commented while I was away, but please know that, despite my silence, every comment was read and deeply appreciated. C) I got my timeline a bit wonky and skipped a scene I’d been intending to write all along. The most recently posted chapter is chapter 12, which comes before what was the end of chapter 11 and is now chapter 13. D) There's a note of apology and gratitude [over here](https://withthebreezesblown.tumblr.com/post/159651680947/a-note-for-anyone-who-commentedlikedread-my) for all of the people who read and/or liked and/or commented on my fic while I wasn't around.

The time passes with a strange ease that Solona is unfamiliar with, kept track of more easily by the growing collection of Phoebe’s drawings circling farther and farther around her rooms than by any sense of the days passing.

Phoebe has been with her for four years already when she receives the letter from Wynne that brings the terrible news that she had forgotten to brace herself for, to fear.

Nathaniel had returned from the Marches months before with rumors of unrest in Kirkwall in general and within its Circle in particular. She’d spared a moment of gratitude that Phoebe was safe with her and a moment of amusement that, whatever had become of him, Anders was still himself enough to cause a bunch of templars a ruckus, and then she’d thought little more of it. She should have known, perhaps, that the thing she herself began the night she accidentally dragged Justice from his place in the Fade was a mistake that must still be paid for.

Fires in the streets, Wynne said. Hundreds dead. Innocents dead. The city in chaos.

It cannot have been him, she thinks. For all his blithe sidestepping of serious issues, for all his feigning indifference, she has not forgotten who Anders is. The healer who always made sure innocent bystanders got to safety. The man always ready with a rush of cool, calm magic to fix her up no matter how desperate and frantic the battle around them. Anders is a saver of lives, not a destroyer. It cannot have been him.

Only it was. There is no question; though the rumors out of Kirkwall abound, this is the one facet they all agree upon: the Darktown Abomination who posed as a healer is responsible. For a moment, while no one is in her office to see, she lets her head fall into her hands.

“Oh, Anders.  _ What have you become _ ?”

  
  


It’s a little over a week after Wynne’s letter that she overhears Seneschal Garevel giving what she recognizes as the polite refusal speech at the main doors.

“I see. So you don’t have an appointment to see the Commander then?”

She doesn’t quite make out the words, but she does catch the desperation in the voice of the man outside. She sighs. It would be so much easier to just walk past. So what if it’s raining? (When  _ isn’t _ it?) She takes a hesitating step forward.

“I’m a Grey Warden. I serve under Commander Stroud.”

“Yes? And you have a letter with his seal, I assume?”

She can’t help thinking that Garevel needn’t sound so smug.

“I--well, no--you see the thing is--well, Kirkwall--the thing is, Commander Amell--she’s my cousin.”

She knows before he opens his mouth that Garevel is only about two more sentences away from shutting the door in disinterested disbelief when she steps around him, speaking. “Commander Amell’s cousin, you say? I wasn’t aware she had any cousins.”

The man standing there in the rain is huge. The only person she can think of offhand that he is  _ not _ taller than is Sten. He also comes closer to Sten in breadth of shoulders than she thinks she’s ever seen. The absurdly sized greatsword strapped to his back looks almost reasonably proportioned on him.

He starts to answer, pushing wet hair and rain out of his face, and then stops when he gets a good look at her. He glances back at the mabari and two huddled figures behind him with hoods pulled down low, apparently having some sort of silent argument in gestures before he turns back. “No. You wouldn’t be. When my mother ran away with an apostate I don’t suppose they decided to keep track of her children in the family copy of the Chant.”

She feels her brows raise as she steps forward, trying to get a better look at the man’s features. Dark hair. Pale eyes that might or might not be the same color as her own. “You’re Leandra’s son.”

“I--yes. And my sister…” He glances behind him again, and when he turns back, there’s something terribly dark and frustrated in his expression. “Look, can we--can we just come in?”

“Well, let’s not waste her time, shall we?” a woman’s voice speaks up from behind him. It’s somehow both cultured and indelicate at the same time. “Might as well make sure she isn’t just going to toss this bloody wanker right back out before we go inviting ourselves in, don’t you think?” 

One of the hooded figures reaches out and pulls back the cloth around the face of the other.

For a moment Solona just stands there feeling gut-punched, until, without really deciding to, she’s moving forward, arm raising, but instead of the slap landing against Anders’ face, she finds slender fingers in steel tight grip around her wrist.

“I understand that you feel betrayed and all, but given that he didn’t spend the night before he did what he did fucking  _ you _ , if anyone is going to hit him, it’s going to be  _ me _ .” The woman smiles at her then, and though it’s sharp and vicious there’s something conspiratorial, almost like camaraderie, in it. “To be fair, I  _ have _ hit him. I wouldn’t necessarily mind doing it again for your satisfaction though.”

She is a bit stunned. Without everything that’s come with it, the revelation that Anders and this cousin, who she didn’t even know she had, are in some sort of relationship would have delighted her. Now it is merely another layer of complexity, another thing she’s unsure how to feel about. It takes Solona a few slow, deep breaths before, pulling her wrist free, she moves aside. “Come in. Quickly. Did anyone see you on your way up the hill? Was he recognized?”

The woman snorts. “No. We look quite as pathetically bedraggled and nearly drowned as any other Kirkwall refugee.” Another snort. “First a refugee in Kirkwall, and then a refugee in my own damned home country. Who but I could have such bloody rotten luck?” With a glare at Anders, his hair plastered to his hollow cheeks, she tosses her chin in the air hard enough to knock her own hood back and marches into the keep.

Inside, Solona leads them to her own private sitting room. Once she’s found them dry clothes and built up the fire, she stands nervously, the tension thick. The only two that do not seem to feel it are Muffin and the mabri her cousins have brought, whose name, as far as she can tell, appears to be  _ Kitten _ (not that she has much room to judge). The hounds are happily sniffing each other’s hind quarters, stubby tails wagging contentedly. She tries to let the very commonplace normality of it calm her. “Can I, ah, get you all something to drink?”

“That would be nice; thank you.” The tall, broad-shouldered one who has given his name as Carver smiles at her as he scrubs a towel over his dark hair.

“Oh, yes. And a very  _ hard _ drink would be very nice indeed.” Rather than bothering with a towel, Marian shakes her head back and forth not dissimilarly from the dog she brought with her, dark curls slinging droplets of water around her… primarily, Solona notices, onto Anders, sitting beside her on the settee.

When she returns with a bottle of whiskey and four tumblers, she gives Anders a sour look. “You’re in luck. I’ve found the one creature in all of Thedas who will, despite everything, be unreservedly happy to see you again.”

Behind her trots an orange tabby sniffing at all the unfamiliar scents curiously until he catches a familiar one amongst them, and with a loud squawk, true to his name, Ser Pounce-a-lot launches himself toward Anders.

They drink in silence for a while, though the appearance of his cat has evidently eased the tension for Anders at least, who keeps cooing at the feline.

After her fourth repour, Marian gives Anders an almost affectionate smirk. “Stop that. You aren’t allowed to be adorable when I’m mad at you.”

“You could stop being angry then.” A slight, teasing grin graces his face and then disappears, leaving his expression terribly serious as his fingers stretch out across the space between them and come to a stop just shy of hers. 

Carver clears his throat, a rough note of suppressed rage in the noise as he struggles to change the topic before his sister can respond. "I wish Mother could be here to meet you. She always called you 'one of ours,' with so much pride in her voice."

Though the diversion is aimed at Marian, Solona is the one who finds herself failing to be distracted. She can’t set her anger aside yet though.

“How could you? Anders-- _ how could you _ ?”

He sighs, setting his glass down on a side table and leaning forward to rest his head in his hands. “How could I? The same way I became a Warden, that’s how. Sometimes when the world is a monstrous place you have to be willing to become a monster to change it.”

She can hear in his voice the full guilt he carries for his actions, and she understands that he knows he cannot justify this, not to her and not to himself. He cannot tell her it was right. He can only tell her  _ why _ he did it. 

He looks up at her slowly through his fingers. “I wanted to find a different way so badly. And Marian… there were times she nearly convinced me we could. But then nothing would change.  _ Nothing ever changed _ . And the things the mages I got out of that place told me… Solona, the  _ things that were done to them _ . And no one was willing to do anything about it. Because  _ there was nothing decent to be done _ . There was no reasoning with Meredith, and even if Elthinia had tried, she'd have done it  _ nicely  _ and  _ properly _ and  _ nothing would have changed _ . So I did the monstrous thing that no one else was willing to.”

Despite everything, despite all the anger she still holds toward him, she finds her heart breaking a little when she understands that he fully comprehended the horror of his actions before he took them, that he considered not only innocent lives to be among the price that must be paid for changing the injustices that no one else would but his own innocence and decency as well, because he is the healer who had pretended he wasn't crying when he delivered a baby for the butcher’s wife in Amaranthine, a rescuer of kittens, a man who paid Amaranthine’s orphans a whole sovereign apiece for the privilege of relieving them of a winter cough.

There’s another long silence, and it takes her a moment to realize that the weight of it is exhaustion. Of course it is. They’ve been on the road for days, carrying the burden of what Anders has done with them every step. “How many beds do you need?”

When Anders meets her eyes, he can only shrug. “Ask Marian.”

The woman makes a sound half snarl, half sigh. “Two.”

When he reaches for her hand again, she pulls away. “Who says I’m not suggesting that  _ you _ can sleep on the floor?”

When he just sits there calmly, as though this is surely no more than he deserves, she makes the snarly sigh again before grabbing his wrist and hauling him up with her. “Oh, shut up. Just shut up.” Even as she says the words, one arm slides around his waist and her forehead leans heavy into his chest. Her voice is only a whisper on the last repetition. “Just shut it, you.”

  
  


Though fitfully and as full of nightmares as ever (people screaming and burning in an unfamiliar city street), Solona sleeps longer than usual. There’s already light coming through the windows and the sounds of bustle as she makes her way to the kitchens.

Though it’s a sound she’s only heard on a few rare occasions, Solona recognizes the shriek of outrage that greets her in the hall outside instantly as Phoebe’s.

_ Well, shit _ .

She’d planned to have a talk with the girl, who she knows has heard the rumors for all that she’s tried to keep them from her.

When she hurries into the kitchen, Phoebe has Anders backed up to the far wall while her fists rain down on him again and again. Marian, for her part, is standing by with a smile that’s half bewildered, half impressed. Apparently she does not feel the need to usurp the right to hit Anders from teenage girls.

“You idiot! You absolute idiot!” The Starkhaven accent comes out thickly in her anger, idiot sounding more eejit. “You were supposed to  _ save _ people! Like you  _ saved me _ ! I thought you were--” There’s a sound like a she’s about to cry that’s broken by a noise that sounds more appropriate for an angry cat than a girl. “I thought you were  _ a good person! _ ” She makes the angry cat noise again, louder, and Pounce goes scrambling from behind a barrel and races out of the room. “You---you--depraved fucking arsepiece!”

Solona’s chin rises sharply, and her head turns to catch another ginger figure fleeing after Pounce. Oh, he’d better run. Oghren is in  _ so much trouble _ .

That’s when the sob finally bursts from Phoebe. Solona is making her way to her sister when Anders reaches up to smooth her hair. She expects the girl to pull away, and is ready to catch her, but instead she falls forward into him, crying freely now. After a long moment, face still buried against his robes, she asks quietly, “Is it true? The Gallows are empty now? No more mages will be hurt there anymore?”

He just strokes her hair for a moment before he answers. “It’s true. I got them out. I told you eventually I’d get them all out, didn’t I?”

There’s a soft, broken sigh amidst the sound of Phoebe’s crying, and her voice is so quiet it’s hardly audible when she speaks. “I just didn’t think you meant like that.”

Anders’ voice is almost as quiet when he answers. “No. I didn’t think I meant like that back then either.”

  
  


Anders and Marian stay for only a few days. Carver, it’s decided, will stay on at the Vigil. Having abandoned his post specifically against the orders of his commanding officer, he doesn’t suspect that returning to the Marcher Wardens will go well for him, and secretly this delights Solona.

The only person who doesn’t treat Anders with suspicious uncertainty is Oghren, who immediately welcomes the man with his own smelly, antagonistic sort of affection. The dwarf takes the berating she gives him over the language Phoebe used surprisingly well, or he seems to until she realizes he’s actually just even more drunk than usual. Exasperated, she simply leans down close to his face.

“Shleets, Oghren. That’s all I’m saying.  _ Shleets _ .”

Though there’s still an enormous amount of tension and discord between Marian and Anders, there are moments of something else entirely, gentle touches and adoring looks, and for all that they stir something warm and welcome in Solona, they touch on an old ache she had nearly convinced herself she’d forgotten.

The day they pack up to leave, Solona pulls aside Marian, for whom she has already come to feel an immense affection, based largely on a hesitant admiration of the woman’s belligerent, fierce-edged optimism, but also for the slightest glimpses she’s caught of the more vulnerable woman beneath.

“I know what he’s done. It wasn’t my home, and I wasn’t there to have to see the devastation, but… He put  _ everything _ at stake to try to right the wrongs happening in the Gallows. He put his life at stake, and  _ you _ , and  _ worst of all _ , all of the best parts of himself. He traded his own position on the  _ right _ side of the situation  _ to make things right _ . He was willing to  _ be wrong _ to  _ make things right _ . And for someone like Anders, being wrong, doing the horrible thing… Whatever punishment any of us might think he deserves… You know him better than I do; you know him well enough to know he’s punishing himself. He needs you. He needs you to remind him that even though he did something terrible, there’s still good in him.”

The woman catches her off guard when she throws her arms tightly around her.

“He was right about you, you know. I was actually jealous a few times, the way he talked about you, but it was all true. You just keep believing in the best of people until they have no choice but to be what you believe they are. That’s what he said. And thank you. For still seeing the best in him. I needed to hear that.”

When they leave, though letting go of anyone she cares about has always been a hard task for Solona, she finds herself  _ happy _ . She has two cousins she didn’t know about, and she gets to  _ keep _ one of them, and it brings the count of things that are hers to keep up higher still, and she a girl who never expected to have anything of her own to keep. But she has Carver and Muffin and Phoebe and all of her Wardens, and  _ she is happy _ .


	13. The Tongueless Vigil and All the Pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [nanahuatli](http://nanahuatli.tumblr.com/) always gets my thanks for editing, but she gets _extra_ thanks for all the help with this chapter.

The realization that she is happy never ceases to amaze her. The words Wynne had once told her about being able to think about everything she'd once had without the pain of the loss never do quite become true, but it does become almost easy to ignore. Leliana visits the Vigil every year, and Phoebe asks her endless questions about their time together during the Blight. When Alistair's name falls from Leliana's mouth by accident, she glances at Solona with a guilty expression, gauging her reaction, but Solona keeps a steady enough smile to convince even her friend who has made a living out of reading people's secrets. Solona has never been one to fail to be grateful for what she has, and for all the things she does _not_ have, what she does is more than she would ever have believed possible once.

The summer after Marian and Anders leave is the hottest she has experienced. Phoebe takes to frosting out-of-the-way sections of floor for Muffin to sprawl against and asking Solona a thousand questions about dogs being Wardens as she lies beside him. It doesn’t occur to her to think anything of his lethargy when she can barely summon the energy to put on all the layers of her armor and march out on the trail of darkspawn herself.

As though the seasons are trying to balance themselves out, temperatures drop fast throughout the fall, until winter descends more frigidly than usual. By the time spring settles, sweet and mild, they are, all of them, eager for it.

She takes Phoebe and Muffin to the beach. While they chase each other, she settles herself at the shoreline. It’s a good day. She can taste salt on her lips, and she can hear her sister laughing, and the world is just a little better than it once was, and it is a good day.

She could understand what happens next if she had been ungrateful, if she had not understood how precious a thing a good day is. But she was not, and she does, and when her sister screams, all she can think is, _No._ What she has, it is enough, but she has nothing left that she can bear the loss of, nothing to spare. _No_.

There is a trail of dead genlocks that she can easily identify as Muffin’s kills leading to the mouth of the cave where Phoebe hovers, uncertain, magelight shining into the darkness in one hand while the other gives off a cloud of condensation that tells Solona she’s pulling frost from the Fade, preparing an ice spell.

The moment she reaches her, Solona is simultaneously trying to haul her back and check her over for any scratch or wound. _Please not the taint. Not Phoebe. Not the fucking taint._

A terrible sound of pain from the cave makes her freeze before she’s throwing her sister away from her, away from the cave. “Get _back_.”

And then she’s running. The sound comes again. She runs faster, magelight hardly enough for the dark cave as she slides on slick stones, goes down, cutting her palms on the rocks before she’s scrambling forward again, pulling out Spellweaver, the sharp point glancing off the stones as she tries to use it to help keep her upright. And then suddenly there are darkspawn ahead of her, too many, all crowded into the narrow passage so tightly that she can’t even seen Muffin, though she can hear a ragged whimpering now. There are at least twenty of the foul creatures.

And all she can wonder is _why. Why_ he would run ahead without her. Why he wouldn’t hold them off at the mouth of the cave until she reached him.

He shrieks again, and something tears loose inside her, a wave of magic crashing out and over everything as her sword moves, more by muscle memory than will.

When the darkspawn all lie dead, there is a moment of silence before the sound begins again. _His legs._ Neither magic nor alchemy could hope to heal what has been done.

It’s only when she tries to shush him, one trembling hand resting between his ears, that she realizes the noise is not coming from him now.

“Solona?”

Her head snaps around as she tries to block her sister’s view. It is nothing the girl needs to see.

“I told you to stay back!” Her voice is a snarl, nothing like any tone she’s ever spoken to her sister in.

There is a long silence, heavy with horror, before Phoebe moves forward.

“Muffin?”

The noise begins again, louder than before, breaking on a sobbed question. “ _Why? Why did he do this?"_

The girl’s chin wobbles, and then her jaw sets and her chin rises. “I wanted to tell you. I knew you didn’t want to see, but… he’s had a _limp_ since winter started.” She reaches out and takes his ear, one thumb rubbing in a circular pattern before moving it for Solona to see. “He has _bald spots_ . Solona… _I wanted to tell you,_ but you can see as well as I can, and _you didn’t want to_. It’s the taint.”

The girl takes a deep breath and says with gentle determination, “He did it because he deserved a Calling too.”

She feels her sister’s arms come around her shoulders. “ _Look at him, Solona._ He’s _hurting_. He has been for a while. Solona… you have to let him go.”

She wants to rage. She wants to yell. She wants to deny everything. The limp. The bald spots. The truth.

And at the same time, she is ashamed that a fourteen-year-old girl has seen so clearly what she has refused to. She is ashamed of the reason she has refused to see it.

He promised her. He promised her he would stay with her.

He promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a horrible person, and I'm sorry. Please don't look at me like that.


	14. The Stranger Who Was Yourself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to [trulycertain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain) for introducing me to the poem this chapter's title comes from.

After the pyre has burned, the Wardens gather. There’s drinking, and fond remembrance, and drinking, and laughter, and, as might be expected among those for whom life is unsure and death a certainty, no solemnity.

Early in the night, she catches sight of her sister, eyes too bright, face flushed, and pulls Nathaniel aside with a muttered curse as she takes the whiskey from his hands and downs it herself. “Keep an eye on Phoebe and don’t let her have anything else to drink.”

Listening to every story-- _bit the Blighted bugger right on his arse… took an arrow meant for me, he did_ \--feels like swallowing glass, but she sits through each, laughing where she’s supposed to, every shared memory punctuated with a swallow of burning liquid that slowly dulls the ache. Muffin is not just a fallen Warden; he was a Blight hero. It is his due. And so she swallows it all down, the tales and the liquor.

Later, when she walks her sister to her room to tuck the giggling girl into her bed, the halls spin and waver so hard it takes all of her concentration not to go bouncing off of them.

There’s a relief in being so uncoordinated, she thinks when she’s made her way back to the ruckus in the dining hall, pausing in the doorway to catch herself. It takes all of her concentration. It leaves no room for anything else.

It leaves no room for what giving Muffin the end he deserved cost her. How he’d twisted himself to lick her wrist a last time when she laid a palm on the fur over his heart, already crusting with drying blood, pulling from the Fade, _slowly now, stop, peace, be still, good boy._

She turns suddenly, nearly toppling over as she launches herself away from the noise of the hall. While they laugh and shout, she wants nothing more than silence. While they remember, she wants nothing more than to be free of her memories.

If it occurs to her that wandering the countryside in her current state may not be the best idea, the concern is not enough to give her pause. She wants the susurration of the sea. She wants the roar and the hush that cover everything. She wants the stars that she can name every one of shining over her, and the salty wind on her face. She wants to remember that the world is still full of beauty. She wants something that will distract her enough to allow her to shove the pain down into the place where she does not have to touch it.

Before she can make it to the main doors, there is the sound of running steps and someone calling after her, “Commander--a moment.”

She stops only because her coordination isn’t quite up to the task of turning her head back while walking. “It’ll keep til morning, surely.”

It’s Gareth, the youngest of her Wardens. She’d nearly turned him away when he’d arrived at the Vigil the year before, had hardly believed him when he insisted he was older than _she_ had been during the Blight. He still has the round, wide-open face of a boy, cringing now as he glances over his shoulder then steps toward her despite her dismissal. “It’s just, there’s a man from the city. He said he brought a token in honor of Muffin. He asked if he might be allowed to present it to you himself. He seemed… rather sincerely upset, but I can tell him you’re unavailable…”

For a moment, there’s  wave of resentment for every person who thinks that _they_ have lost something. It crashes over her and then retreats, leaving her heavy with the weight of it, but unable to summon anger. She remembers how proudly Muffin had pranced down the streets of Amaranthine, pausing to let his admirers, as she was certain he thought of them, scratch his head or toss him a scrap of bacon. He had loved the city. And if now the citizens have come to pay their homage too, she has no right to refuse it.

But the volume still echoing through the high ceilinged hall is too much. She sighs. “In my office, then.”

She waits by the office’s window. It’s raining. She cannot see into the darkness through the leaded glass, but she can hear it. A part of her wants to blast her way through the window and just run. She doesn’t wanted to be gifted with any more of anyone else’s memories.

She settles a hip against her desk to steady herself while Gareth ushers in a man in a ratty cloak with a threadbare hat pulled low over his face.

It’s his hands that catch her attention. Not the carefully carved mabari being twisted in them; the hands themselves: the long, calloused fingers, the scar across the left palm ( _where he’d grabbed a dagger aimed at her, fighting it up and out of the genlock’s hand even as it bit through glove and flesh_ ), the slight dip where the knuckle of the right ring finger doesn’t quite align with the rest ( _shortly after he arrived at the Chantry, he said, there’d been a particularly despotic wall--he still insisted it had deserved that punch_ ). The details she hadn’t known she still remembered.

She feels suddenly, terribly sober. She cannot quite manage to move her gaze as she gives Gareth a vague gesture waving him away. “It’s fine. I’ll show him out.” She prays they cannot, either of them, hear how close she is to a breaking point.

There’s a moment where the only sounds are Gareth’s footsteps, and then the man before her shifts, one hand rising to pull the hat from his head. Her eyes stay on the hand hovering in front of him, clutching the mabari statuette.

“I… I wanted…” He sighs and thrusts the figurine out at her. “I, uh, made it myself. I took up whittling. No one will spar with me, you know. Afraid of damaging His Precious and Most Fragile Majesty. I tried to point out that, worst case scenario, one more scar would hardly be noticeable amongst the rest, but…” He shrugs. “And the practice dummies were getting sick of my face. I’m certain they were plotting my demise."

She accepts the mabari, careful not to touch him as she does. It is a finely crafted thing, the wood smooth under her fingers and polished to a gleam, the features surprisingly vivid. “This is… you can’t have just done this today.”

“Well, no. I’ve made everyone. I just… when I heard, I thought… you should have him.”

The place inside her where she has pushed down every emotion she does not know how to face heaves, and terror hits her that is all going to come rushing up at her now. If she could not bear them one by one, she cannot possibly endure them rising up together. She cannot look up from the figure in her hands. She cannot keep the panic from her voice. “Thank you, but you have to go now.”

He sighs, and from her peripheral vision she can see him rake one hand through his hair. “Will you at least just look at me before I go?”

She doesn’t.

“I just--I just want to know you’re going to be okay.”

And just like that, the breaking point is reached.

“Why do you even fucking _care_?! I _ruined_ your life! I _ruin_ everything! Am I fucking _okay_?” The last word is practically a shriek. She has always managed to convince herself that she is something more and better than okay. But tonight, in the wake of her loss, in the upheaval of every piece of pain she has never known how to untangle and so has pushed down to knot together into this terrible mess, the answer is something else entirely. “Of course I’m not! He was my best friend! He wasn’t the only thing I have, but he was the only thing I have left from _before_ \--he was the only one--” As her voice breaks on a sob, Alistair steps forward. While there’s a part of her that wants to melt into him, that still knows how it would feel to be pressed against him, her fists come up, and she finds herself hitting his chest again and again. “He fucking promised me he would stay with me! He promised me just like you did, and now he’s gone, and I can’t--I can’t--” He pulls her to him, arms tightening around her until her fists are trapped uselessly between them. It’s both familiar and strange, and it’s the strangeness that ends her fit as much as the familiarity. Yelling done, her forehead falls against him as she whispers, “Why did he promise?”

His hands make soothing motions on her back while he lowers his face to her hair. His own voice is raw with pain but tearless “...Because he loved you.”

She isn’t sure exactly who either of them are talking about anymore. She isn’t sure it matters. She just leans further into him, face turning to press her cheek and ear against his heart, breath slowing to match the rhythm there. When she’s sure she can speak without crying again, she mumbles, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Maker, you don’t have anything to be sorry for. You never did understand that you’re allowed to be upset. It doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. Just because you aren’t in the Circle doesn’t mean that every terrible thing that happens to you is still somehow better than what you deserve. You’re _allowed_ to be devastated by this, Solona.”

With a sigh, she tries to pull away, but he resists.

“Can I just… have another minute?”

She lets out a little huff that might almost be a laugh and stills herself, face settling back against him.

“I almost came to see you last month. I mean, I’ve thought about it a thousand times, but I very nearly did decide to come see you before I went back to the Palace.”

“Why? ... Back to the Palace from where?”

“My father died.”

She considers this a moment, confused. “Well, yes… that was over a decade ago, wasn’t it?”

His chin shifts against her hair as he shakes his head. “No. Turns out it wasn’t. I… got to talk to him. Before he died. It was in the Fade, but… it was something.”

She works her arms free from where they’re trapped between them and wraps them hesitantly around his waist. “What did he say?”

His snort is soft but bitter. “That he never wanted this for me.”

“Then I’m sorry to him too.”

He continues as though he hasn’t heard her. “That Ferelden is in good hands.” He sighs. “You weren’t wrong, Solona. It took me a while to understand. It took more than wanting to make you happy to make me a passable king. I had to find my own reasons.”

When she pulls away this time he lets her. It’s the first chance she’s had to really get a look at him. His face has lost some of the roundness it still had the last time she saw him, and there are lines that weren’t there before around his eyes; his hair is longer, curling around his neck in a way that is decidedly reminiscent of the portraits she’s seen of Maric. She wants to touch it. She doesn’t. “Where did you find them? Your reasons?”

He smiles at that. “I was at the market, and there was a skinny, little elven kid in an alley eyeing a table of apples. I bought him one. He ran off as soon as I handed it to him, but he… he looked at me like… well, I know what kind of looks Blight heroes and kings get, but he looked at me like I was fucking _Andraste_.” He shrugs now, shakes his head in a way that says he doesn’t know if he’s making sense. “Anyone could have done it. Anyone could have bought a scared kid an apple. It was such a small thing, but… Changing the world sounded so much bigger than anything I could possibly do. I had no idea how to do that. But I could do more than buy a kid an apple. There were things I could do and I wasn’t, because Eamon and every other nosy idiot who thought it was his job to give me advice kept telling me I shouldn’t. So I quit listening.”

He draws a big breath. “It’s not easy. But it’s worth fighting for. I just… I just wanted to tell you again… even after all this time… I still think you’re something worth fighting for. I’m not saying it would--”

She touches two fingers to his lips, allows them to rest there only a moment before she withdrawals them. “You are… Maker, you’re everything I knew you could be, and I am _so, so_ _proud_ of you. But didn’t I already tell you? I won’t be the thing that ruins you. I _won’t_.” She crosses her arms over her chest, looks away and then back, steeling herself. “Is this why you haven’t married? Maker, Alistair, we aren’t going to live forever!”

When he laughs, though it isn’t without bitterness, it is also not without genuine mirth. “You’d take all the credit for that too, would you? You’d better watch out. Your clever dwarven architect won’t be happy if he has to resize all of your keep’s doors to fit the incomparable Hero of Ferelden’s head through them.”

She just stares at him blankly before an incredulous giggling that cannot be contained rises out of her. Maker, she had not realized that she had missed his teasing as much as his embrace. “Well, do tell what your reason is then.”

He grins brilliantly, and though it’s toothy, there’s a darkness she doesn’t ever remember seeing in his mischief in it. “As it so happens, I take a rather enormous vindictive pleasure in the idea that, after everything I gave up to sit on that damn throne, there is one thing I can take back from the dimwits who insist I belong there because my blood dictates it. Not that it’s likely I’d really be able to father a child anyway. But I take a particular delight in the knowledge that I’m not even trying. You were the reason before I had the courage to refuse Eamon for myself. These days, the defiance is really the reward in and of itself.”

She feels her face falling before she can stop it. “ _Alistair_. You don’t need an heir because Ferelden can’t exist without the Theirin bloodline. You need an heir to make sure your country doesn’t dissolve into civil war when you _die._ ”

“I have an heir. I’ve named Teagan and Katie’s boy as my heir. He’s… precocious, and he’s got the best tutors the royal treasury can buy. Teagan can be Regent until he’s old enough.”

“Alistair--” Her voice is rising rapidly, a note of something like panic in it, though she can’t say exactly what has made her so upset.

He groans at the tone of her voice. “Look, can we talk about something else before I have to go? You never tell me anything in those damned letters. Tell me about the Vigil. ...Tell me you’ve been happy.”

Without warning, she throws her arms around his neck, and squeezes fiercely before stepping away again.

He raises a startled, curious eyebrow.

“For Phoebe,” she explains. “I never did thank you properly. I still haven’t. I can’t thank you enough. She’s…”

His smile is an amused, affectionate curl of his lips. “She’s something. Damn good at drawing too.”

Her head tips to the side as she considers this. “How did you know that?”

“Ah...” His lopsided grin is decidedly guilty now. “She sends her drawings to me sometimes? I have a really lovely one of Amaranthine in the rain.”

Her jaw sets, and he actually flinches when she turns the full force of her suspicious displeasure on him. “She sends you drawings of _me_.” It isn’t a question.

“Um. Well.” His eyes dance away from hers, across the floor, but a small smile lingers around his mouth. “They’re really quite magnificent.”

“She’s in so much trouble for this.”

 

 

It’s only after he’s gone that she figures out exactly what has made her so upset about his adamance that he doesn’t need an heir. He’s given up. He’s given up on the idea of ever having anything for himself, of ever having someone to love him, of ever having a family. And for all the dread she’s lived with waiting to receive word of his engagement, _this_ is a thousand times worse to her. And now there is nothing to be done. Their Callings will not spare them either a great deal longer, and he’s wasted so long living with the memory of her. Whatever he says his reasons are, it’s surely a part of it. Now, when it’s all but too late, she understands just how badly she wants for him his pretty wife and his pretty children.

She wanted to set him free once before, but it had still been tangled up in the desire she would not admit to herself to have him back. Now, she wants to see him truly free--free from her, free from the Blight in his blood that binds him to her and blots out his future, free to find himself a wife and be able to father children with her. She needs, she understands, a cure for the taint. It’s supposed to be impossible. Even Avernus in his strange keep in the mountains has had no success. But then it should have been impossible for a seventeen-year-old girl and a boy hardly older to stop a Blight. She’s done the impossible before. She can do this. She can find him a cure.


	15. Til the Ocean Is Folded and Hung Up to Dry

She doesn’t expect searching for a cure for the Calling to be easy. The only thing she might call a potential lead is the former Warden, Grand Enchanter Fiona, but the woman makes it clear from the first letter she sends back to Solona’s inquiries that she’s fully occupied by the state of the Circles since the Kirkwall Rebellion, that whatever she once was, the only loyalties she has now lie with the mages and that she hasn’t the time to be interrogated by a Warden about Warden concerns. In her second letter, sent only after Solona has sent another three, she suggests the Warden Commander seek any other information needed from the records in Weisshaupt. Though Solona doubts she can know just how much tension there is between herself and the Wardens of Weisshaupt, she suspects the woman is well aware that her chances of being allowed access to the records are nearly nonexistent. Though she understands that being Grand Enchanter during such unrest is surely a great and terrible burden, there is something almost aggressive in the woman’s dismissal that Solona cannot account for.

Not that she doesn't have troubles enough of her own. There are always darkspawn causing trouble somewhere, an endless trickle of them constantly finding their way up from the caverns below the earth. For a time, Fiona’s suggestion that she extend her search to the records at Weisshaupt feels like an impassable blockade. It’s only after weeks of half-planning increasingly ridiculous scenarios to gain her access to Weisshaupt (one involves first miraculously bringing back griffons, and then her Wardens descending on Weisshaupt with an army of them) that the one option that is _not_ ridiculous finally occurs to her. By nightfall, the letter she’s written is on its way, and there’s little to do but wait for what will come of it.

In the end, it isn’t a return letter that breaks the waiting. It isn’t news about Weisshaupt, or the Blight, the Taint, or the Wardens at all.

It’s the little enchanted mirror that Wynne gave to her the last time she stopped at the Vigil, and the last news she ever expected to come from the woman who once tried to justify the Circle to her, who tried to convince her to come back to it after the Blight.

“The situation is worse than I…” There’s a sigh, and it is the most tired noise she has ever heard from the woman in the mirror; it’s the first time Solona has ever thought Wynne sounded her age.

“I’m working with Divine Justinia, but I do not know that the momentum that has been building can be stemmed. Do what you can to get your sister and brothers out. Now.”

She’s ready to go by nightfall, and only Nathaniel’s instance on the wisdom of waiting til morning keeps her from riding out then, her way lit only by the moon. She and Phoebe spend the night in hushed conversation, until they eventually fall asleep facing each other, hands twined together. Had she guessed what the morning would bring, she would not have hesitated.

 

She’s already seated on Eluvia, giving Nathaniel last minute instructions on what to do as Lieutenant in her absence, when she spots the figures approaching in the distance. A Warden, she can tell, though she can’t think who. And… is that a templar?

When he’s close enough, she identifies the markings on the templar’s armor that identify him as a Knight-Captain. She doesn’t know what business he could have, approaching with a Warden, but she’s sleepless and anxious and hardly aware of herself when, as he arrives, she dismounts and pulls Spellweaver from its sheath. “Make it quick, templar; I have little time to spare this morning.”

“Ah, yes. He’s, um, he’s with _me_ , actually. Thought he might be useful.”

She turns slowly.

His Warden armor still fits nearly the same as it did during the Blight. Seeing him standing there in it, with the same pleased-with-himself half smile with which he would offer her second helpings of breakfast or a daisy chain for her hair, for just an instant all of the time between the disappears.

But Effie, Galen, and Iggy need her. They need her _now_ , and she has no time for _whatever this even is_.

“What in the bloody fucking Blight are you talking about?”

Alistair’s smile doesn’t waver. “Helping you get your sister and brothers. I thought a Knight-Captain would be useful. You know, make us look very official and fully sanctioned by the Chantry and all. Plus there’s the fact that I’m the King of Ferelden, but I figured that was more of a trump card we’d keep in our back pocket.”

It takes a moment to absorb just what he is assuming.

“Oh, no. Like the Void. Like Maferath’s hairy left ball. _No_ . I don’t even have time for--just _no_.”

He has the nerve to look _amused_ . “Like Maferath’s hairy _right_ ball, _yes_ . There’s really nothing you can do to stop me. You can ignore me. Maker knows I’ve had years to get used to that. But I am following you, and I _am_ helping you do this.”

The templar, for his part, seems content to let them have this out on their own. She hates herself for everyone of them, but her words are designed to cut deep and fast, because every moment she spends here is another moment her siblings spend in a Circle where tensions may snap at any moment. “Don’t be _stupid_ , Alistair! Do you have any idea what’s going on right now? If the Circles fall, you have to be _here_ ! Ferelden will need you! You can’t be off following me around like a _puppy_!”

The smile finally disappears as his jaw tenses. “Don’t presume to tell me what Ferelden needs. Figuring out what Ferelden needs and doing my best to give it have been all I’ve done for years. I know exactly what’s going on. I suspect I know more about it than you. And if you had any idea how much you _mean to people_ , then you would understand that if something happens to you, the Circles falling ceases to be a _question_ and becomes an _inevitability_. Particularly for the Fereldan Circle. By ensuring your safety, I’m doing what I can to stabilize a volatile situation with few factors within my control.”

She can’t contain a noise of frustration. “For the Maker’s sake, even _Phoebe_ understands why she can’t come. Stop being a _child_.”

“I’m not a child!” Her sister is stepping forward suddenly, incensed. “I’m not a _child_ ; I’m _eighteen_ ! I’m older than you when you stopped the Blight! And the _only_ person here who doesn’t think that having Alistair go with you is a _good idea_ is _you_ . You’re the one being _pigheaded_. So stop it. Because I love you too much to watch you throw away a better chance of bringing our family home safely because you’re a giant pighead. So just stop it.”

There’s a waver in the girl’s voice that she has managed to keep out of every conversation up to this one, and it hits Solona hard. She feels herself deflating as she pulls her sister into her arms. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll get them all here. I promise.”

“That’s the thing of though, isn’t it?” Phoebe’s voice trembles harder. “You promise you’ll get _them_ here. You don’t make any promises about _you_ coming back. You don’t have any idea at all. What you mean to _people_ . What you mean to _your Wardens_ . What you mean _to me_.”

“I’ll come home, Pheebs. Of course I’ll come home.” She presses her cheek against her sister’s hair, breathing deeply, the smell of the dragon’s blood resin soap she uses inspiring an ache of familiarity.

“Then take with you the one person in all of Thedas who has the best chance of actually ensuring that, would you?”

Pressing a resigned kiss to her sister’s temple, she sighs. “Whatever you want. As always.” She glances at Alistair, shaking her head as she steps away. “Whatever you want.”

 

“Have you ever seen the sea?”

She isn’t entirely sure why she’s asking.

Well, no; that’s not true. The first time the sight of the sea had washed over her, beautiful and infinite, she had wondered. Because it was the first time the world outside the Circle had shattered and remade her with the marvel of it without him beside her. And there’s no point in awkward silence. He was the person she was closest to in the world once. Surely they can talk to each other like friends.

Alistair glances at her and nods. “Sure. Eamon used to have a summer house on the coast, just outside of Denerim. Well, I suppose he probably still has. I haven’t been since… since I was a child. I guess that was the ocean though, technically, not the sea.”

 _Since he married Isolde_ , she thinks, irritation still ready to bubble up for the woman, even after all these years. “The Waking Sea is prettier. It’s… more alive?” She laughs at herself and shakes her head. “It’s always wavy. When I close my eyes, I feel like it’s _singing_ to me.”

He gives her a smirk she still knows well--it’s the one that asks her if she’s out of her mind. Without thinking, she jabs her elbow into his side, even though she’s grinning. “I suggest you rethink the wisdom of accusing the Warden Commander of Ferelden of madness.”

“What?! I didn’t say anything! And, Maker, I’d forgotten how _sharp_ your elbows are!”

“Your face said enough.” She manages a sort of scowl, though it’s a bit puckered where she’s fighting to keep it from becoming a smile.

“I beg your pardon, Warden Commander. I shall endeavor to make my face say only the most flattering things about you in the future. But honestly, I look forward to anything that comes so highly recommended from you.”

The first part is clearly a joke, but he says the last so sincerely that she doesn’t know what to do with it. “...Right. Well, we’re close now. We’ll be there soon.”

Though they can hear the sounds of the sea a ways before, she insists he not pay attention until they’re standing at the top of the last hill that looks down on Amaranthine’s port, the sounds carried to them on the wind unobstructed.

“Okay, close your eyes and listen.”

Once he does, she follows suit, letting the crash and the roar carry away for a moment all of the tension and awkwardness that she knows this journey will be wrought with. It lasts exactly until she opens her eyes and catches Alistair staring at her.

Though his eyes dart away as soon as hers open, and his expression becomes guilty and caught-out, she knows she wasn’t imagining any of the things she saw there before he turned.

Maker, she hopes the templar, who mercifully seems to be pointedly avoiding looking at the two of them, didn't see what she saw.

Already she feels rubbed raw, her defenses ground away. For anything less than her family, she would turn around now. For all that she _can’t_ turn back, she has suddenly no idea how she is possibly going to make it through.


	16. A Voyage With Water and With Stars

She tries ignoring him. It seems like the easiest way not to get tangled up in things so long gone she doesn’t understand why strands of it are still trying to twist her up.

It doesn’t work. Not on the ship he’s chartered from Amaranthine to the stop along what’s left of the Imperial Highway, and not on the horse ride south along it to Montsimmard.

The ship itself is a fight. She was expecting to take passage on a merchant ship, and this, the fact that he has spent such a great deal on this, for her--she’s furious. “No one pays their taxes to send the Hero of Ferelden on a cruise!”

“It isn’t tax money! I changed that. Tax money doesn’t go into my personal spending money, which is what I use to fund most of my projects because otherwise there’s all this _voting_ and people saying _no_ , and it’s all very boring. The point is, do you know how rarely I actually spend money _for my own pleasure_? If this pleases me, then what do you have to complain about?”

She doesn’t relent until he drags her to the captain and insists the man explain that the money that has been paid to him is not refundable.

In truth, once she grudgingly relents to board the ship at all, it isn’t so bad. It’s… surprisingly easy, for the most part. Knight-Captain Elric is a quiet man, little inclined to intrude on their conversations, and so, elbows resting against the railing of the ship, she leans into the breeze and listens to Alistair tell her about his mabaris.

“Arlessa will being trying to think of something worse than pooping in my bed to punish me for leaving her behind. Probably she’ll eat my entire collection of statuettes and shit them back out in hidden corners all around my rooms for me to find one by one over the next month.

“Grigor… he never really grew into his feet. He’s bigger than either of the others, but he still has that gangly puppy look. Which I suspect is part of where he gets his very fine coordination from… Let’s just say he makes Oghren at his very most intoxicated look graceful as an Antivan circus aerial acrobat.

“And Matins… you’d like Matins. I mean, you’d like them all, but Matins is the one who just wants to drool affectionately on you. I have to watch Arlessa in public, because if she doesn’t like the way someone looks at me she’s liable to make them bleed, but Matins? If someone actually attacked me, I think he’d just sit on them and lick them in the face til they drown in dog slobber.”

As she listens to all his affection, it is the sweetest relief to know that the decision that she made all those years ago, the one she’s carried guilt over for so long, did not rob Alistair of all his happiness, that he has found it despite having to fight his way out from under everything that being King dumped on top of him.

He tells her about his projects with pride in his voice, all the little things he has initiated to encourage tolerance and positive sentiment among the races or to ease the burdens of the poor.

“I started a school, separate from the Chantry, where all children are welcome. The poor, the elves, the dwarves… Anyone who doesn’t like it can send their children to the Chantry like usual, but I dare say they won’t be getting half so good an education from the sisters as from the professors at my school. I’ve been talking to Fergus--Teyrn Cousland--about building one in Highever as well.”

She listens with only a mild smile, but the truth is there is a part of her near tears, a part of her that could fall to her knees at his feet in desperate gratitude. She has never doubted that her choice was the right one for the people of Ferelden, but so many times she's questioned if it was right for _Alistair_. Even after the Satinalia when she knew he'd found his courage, so many times what she did to him has felt like a sin. She feels now like she has been absolved.

She’s grateful too for the distraction he offers from what it might mean that Wynne, of all people, _Wynne_ has expressed doubt in the Circles. It is a thought that, if examined too closely, terrifies her. Once the ship docks, and they are riding toward Montsimmard, it’s a thought that keeps making her push Eluvia a little harder, a little faster.

At the Circle there, the Knight-Commander hesitates, even when Elric hands over papers signed by the Divine herself (and Solona can only wonder at how Alistair has managed _this_ , at how long Wynne, Leliana, and himself have been planning for worst case contingencies on her behalf that it had hardly occurred to her to fear).

“Well, it’s just… I think we ought to wait for Madame de Fer to return.”

Solona cannot help herself. She snorts. “The one time it will do me no good, I find a Knight-Commander who defers to the wishes of the First Enchanter. Isn’t that just delightful?”

Alistair smiles smoothly, stepping around her. “You see, this isn’t the only mage the Wardens have explicit permission from Divine Justinia herself to take custody of, and our good friend Elric here, as an executor of the Divine’s will, is a busy man, of course. _My_ time is surely not so important that I could not wait for the First Enchanter, but Knight-Captain Elric--well, I don’t think it would please Most Holy to know that his, and by extension _her_ , time has been wasted.”

Elric’s head tips in silent acknowledgement.

When they escort Effie in, she’s all steely grace, back straight and chin high--until she catches sight of her sister, and she’s running thoughtlessly, a brilliant smile on her face as the two collide in a tangle of arms and laughter. “Solona! What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

Her arms wrap so far around the tall wisp of a girl ( _woman_ , Solona corrects herself), that she can touch her own elbows as she squeezes fiercely. “I’m taking you back to the Vigil. All of you.” She laughs again, a gasp that could have been a sob. “I mean you and Iggy and Galen. Not _all_ the mages, obviously.”

“Are you--” Effie’s voice wobbles and she tries again, “Are you--” The gasp that interrupts her _is_ a sob as she clings all the harder to her sister.

It’s a moment after the sobs begin to hush that Solona can make out the quiet words in them: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you…”

 

 

Effie rides with Solona, such a slight burden that she hardly slows Eluvia on the trip back up to the coast where they take the ship onward to Cumberland.

The moment Effie steps aboard, there’s a peculiar expression on her face, and sure enough within minutes of setting sail she’s turned a peaky shade of green. While Solona can only hover around her, worried and useless, Alistair takes her by the arm and leads her to the railing at the front of the ship. “Pick a point on the horizon, and focus on it.”

When Solona gives him a questioning look over her sister’s head, he smiles and shrugs. “I didn’t handle my first few overseas journeys so well. I know a few tricks that help.”

The trick he doesn’t name but that becomes clear to Solona as time passes, when Effie is merely pale instead of green, is distraction. He calls her attention from her queasiness easily, telling her he remembers seeing her perform a spectacular bit of magic at some event held by the Empress that he had been unable to excuse himself from.

She just laughs. “The dancing ice sculptures? They were the easy part. Madame de Fer spent a great deal more time working on my smile than the routine.”

He winces. “Yes, they wouldn’t let me have a mask that covered my mouth either. Those are just for the old dowagers and councilors so bored with life they have no expressions left to suffer to contain. That is essentially what the Grand Game is, at its heart. A bunch of rich, bored people watching anyone who isn’t entirely dead on the inside struggle not to give away all their secrets because they think they’re safe behind a bit of porcelain and lace.”

Effie manages a weak laugh and a prim smile as she bows her head to him. “You understand the Grand Game better than many who live to play it, Your Majesty.”

His expression becomes a full-on grimace. “Maker, don’t call me that. If you don’t like Alistair, you can call me idiot. Or pike twirler. I responded to those frequently during the Blight.”

When Effie’s head spins around to direct an accusing glare at Solona, her fingers tighten on the rail, but she goes on glaring. “You didn’t?!”

Solona just laughs. “No, I didn’t. That was Morrigan. And Oghren. Though he left out ‘owner of the filthiest socks in all Thedas.’ I think we all called him that one.”

“Hey!” He draws the word out into two separate syllables. “I may have forgotten to wash my socks once or twice. I’ll have you know that the importance of my personal hygiene improved significantly after--” there’s a pause before he continues, “Wynne lectured me so hard she left _bruises_. That woman could make scolding a Grand Tourney sport.”

She thinks she knows what he was going to say before that slight pause and the smooth continuation. After _her_. After his personal hygiene became more like their interpersonal hygiene. She slams down on the thought immediately, but she can already feel the color rising warmly to her cheeks. Andraste’s knickers, she hopes Effie doesn’t notice.

 

 

In Cumberland, Ignatios accepts Solona’s words with his usual eagerness and enthusiasm, though it slips as he glances over his shoulder at the Circle that’s been his home for all of his life that he can remember, muttering, “I’ll, uh, have to say goodbye to a few people. It might take just a bit.”

When he reemerges, his hair is mussed and his face is flushed, and Solona can't help thinking that it's obvious what kind of goodbye he was saying, but there’s only the slightest tinge of something heavy in his expression as he claps his hands together, grinning. “Right. So, let’s do this.”

Ignatios, mercifully, does not seem to have Effie’s troubles with sea travel, and Alistair’s suggestions have helped her adjust with less discomfort. In the morning, after spending the night in the small cabin she and Solona share, she’s pale, but by the afternoon there’s color in her cheeks again as she determinedly nags at Ignatios. “Really! I know how to cut hair! I did it in the Circle for all the mages. You look a _mess_ like that! Let me just…”

He looks playfully horrified. “My magic resides in my curls! I’d be _Tranquil_ without them!”

Lips twitching, Effie raises an eyebrow. “Or perhaps it’s your absurdity that resides there, and I’ll be doing us all a favor.” She can’t help laughing, louder and more freely that Solona suspects she ever has as the wind carries the sound away. It pulls at something in Solona’s chest and she finds herself resisting the urge to fling her arms around her siblings and hug them desperately.

“Anyway, I’m not going to take _all_ your curls! I’m just going to tone down the striking resemblance to some fine lady’s hairy little ankle-biting dog!”

Solona cannot help joining in. The tumble of ringlets that hangs down to his shoulders has been whipped by the wind into a tangled mess that truly does remind her of one of those under-sized, over-haired Orlesian dogs. “The hair really is doing your familial good looks no favors.” On the words “familial good looks,” she tosses her braid over her shoulder and bats her eyes ridiculously. The only person who doesn't laugh is Alistair.

In the end, Ignatios relents. Though they have to go below deck, out of the wind to do it, and Effie pauses each time the boat rocks against a particularly fierce wave, eyes closing as she breathes carefully through her nose, she does good work, leaving her brother with curls still falling across his forehead in a way that adds to his careless charm.

The more than two weeks they spend traveling around the Free Marches and up the coast to Antiva pass faster than Solona could have guessed, and she has to keep reminding herself that this is not simply some short reprieve that she must cling to every second of before it disappears. The only thing impermanent is Alistair, and there are whole days when she doesn’t catch him looking at her with that terrible look on his face, when she can almost pretend that they are just friends, that she is as glad to see him as she would be to see Leliana or Zevran.

There are other moments too, though, moments she won’t miss at all, when the light catches his hair, so much longer than it was years ago, and the fact that she cannot reach out and run her fingers through it feels the same that holding back laughter in front of templars felt so long ago, when he smirks just so and she remembers a time when the only way to make him stop was to kiss it off his stupid face. What she hates most is that every time she catches on some piece of pain, it hurts worse. Wynne had so nearly been right before all this. He was only an old ache. But the more time she spends with him, the more he makes her brother and sister laugh, the more she has to look at his stupid, wonderful face with his stupid, beautiful smirks and smiles… It feels like waking up from a dream, things blurry and half-forgotten coming more and more clearly into focus, and a part of her hates him for it, hates him for how easily he fits into her family, into her life, hates _herself_ because this is what they could have had, all these years of this, if she hadn’t been so determined that Ferelden deserved him more than the two of them deserved the happiness they had together.

If he notices that she wants to speak to him less and less, he doesn’t say anything. He lets himself be relegated aside, happy to just watch her and her siblings. Not that that is any better when he has that unbearable look on his face.

Ignatios catches her by the elbow, leaning in so that the wind will whip his words away from anyone but her. “So what’s up with the fact that he’s obviously in love with you, but every time you look at him, you look away with this closed-off, impossible to read expression? If he’s upset you, I know this excellent spell that will make him feel like spiders are crawling around in his smalls…”

“No! No; he hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s just... ” She sighs. “I made him King. He didn’t want to be. I did it, and I have no right to complain about it now.

He just looks puzzled. “Like a king’s never had a mage for a lover?”

She can feel her face harden. “Not him. He has to be above reproach. Don’t you understand? He only gets away with pursuing elf and mage rights and reform because the Chantry has nothing to use against him.”

He considers this. “But you were together? Before? How does no one know that? It definitely seems like the kind of thing there’d be ballads about.”

“When the whole world’s going mad, you’d be surprised how easy it could be to not notice two idiots in love. Those who were close enough _to_ notice owe us more loyalty than to share our secrets.”

“So you’ve just been pining for each other for what, the last _nine_ _years_?”

“It isn’t--that’s not a fair--it isn’t like that. It isn’t like this. Seeing him again--” She’s trying; she’s trying so hard not to do the thing that comes naturally, the thing that comes so much more easily than any of these words that aren’t right, but she’s bared everything that can stand the light of day, and she’s done. “Look, can we just not do this? I’ve been over it all more times than you can imagine, and there’s nothing left to do or say, so can we just leave it alone?”

Ignatios glances over his shoulder at Alistair, standing with Effie, and then back at her. Though there’s a soft, teasing smirk at the edges of his expression, there’s something terribly sad and doubtful at the heart of it. “You can try.”

 

 

It’s only when her arms are wrapped around Galen’s chest and his arms around her shoulders that she breathes a sigh of relief. Whatever is going on with Wynne, whatever is happening with the Circle and the College of Enchanters, her family is safe.

At her suggestion, Alistair does not wear his Warden armor. Having dealt with the Antivan Circle’s Knight-Commander before, Solona suggests that it may be time to use whatever advantage that him being King will gain them. He wears fur-lined leather, a getup that’s nearly too modest to suggest his royalty, but somehow is quintessential Fereldan nobility. Of all the things questioned, that he is who he claims is not one of them.

He deals with the Knight-Commander with a self-assured, almost impatient finesse. There’s something about it, something about seeing him treat a templar small and unimportant and powerless, that makes her want to kiss him. It makes her want to more than kiss him. It makes the whole world a giddy, heady rush, and it was one thing to feel this way when she was seventeen, but she’s too old for this, and it’s entirely the wrong time, and really everything about this is wrong.

She’s fighting to ground herself when her brother’s cool hand slips into hers. His eyes are on Alistair and the Knight-Commander, his face filled with a hard, vindictive satisfaction. She has to choke back a laugh as the world settles around her. She’s evidently not the only one appreciating watching the Antivan templars be handled by the Fereldan King.

 

 

Back on the ship, the only thing missing is Phoebe. Alistair has had the captain acquire some Antivan brandy while they were collecting Galen, and well into the night they drink together, laughing with an abandon that only those who have not always been free could appreciate. At one point, Effie lets out a shriek-like cackle and then immediately apologizes. Even as she’s mumbling, “Sorry,” around her fingers, Solona is pulling her hands from her mouth.

“Don’t be. Don’t be sorry for making noise ever, ever again. You can make all the noise you want from now on.”

Effie just smiles shyly at her sister for a moment before drawing a deep breath, closing her eyes, and tilting her head back. The howl she lets out is deafening and without reserve. Soon they are all screaming, shrieking, howling, and laughing at the moon, even Alistair, and it is one of the perfect moments that she will treasure, a joyful thing she’ll take into the joyless Deep Roads when the time comes. This: the ocean air leaving salt on her lips that clashes with the taste of brandy, the sound of her family, free and unafraid, Alistair’s hand in the center of her back, steadying her, or maybe just there because he put it there and she didn’t pull away, all the constellations she knows lighting the world so softly and sweetly. The moment is a gift, and all she can feel in it is gratitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to throw out an extra thank you for all of the joy you people bring me. For the kudos and the comments and for simply reading: _thank you_.


	17. These Are the Isolate, Slow Faults

Now that her family is safe, Solona itches to be home. She cannot forget what happened the last time she left the Vigil for anything other than Warden business. She tells herself that this is all that’s worrying her. She tells herself that she isn’t itching to be free of Alistair in equal measures to the pleasure she can’t help taking in his happiness, in _him_. She tells herself that now that her family is free of it, she isn’t worried what will happen with the Circle, because it has no power over her at all anymore, and she has no reason to care about it one way or another. She is a Warden, and those she cares about are free. She tells herself she has no time for any further concern for the mages left to the Circle and its uncertain fate. Solona Amell tells herself many things.

When Leliana appears in the little mirror she’s kept with her, eyes red but face hard, she tells herself _no_ . She tells Leliana, “ _No_.” If she says it vehemently enough, loud enough, perhaps she can make it true. She can bring Wynne back by the fervor of her refusal to accept that the woman, who was a friend and at times more like a mother to her than anyone she remembers, is dead. That the Circle has fallen hardly even registers in the wake of Wynne’s death.

She drops the mirror and does not worry about where it slides. It cannot be true. There is no place inside her big enough to push this down, and her siblings and Alistair are watching her, and she will not break in front of them, but she does not know how not to break under the weight of this, and all the _no_ ’s in the world will not stop it crushing down on her.

And then Alistair is there, arms wrapping about her while he just mutters, “I know; I know,” again and again in her ear. She wraps the words around and around her until everything is bound up tight inside her, and then pulls away.

She cannot think about it. She cannot stop thinking about it. She is stuck in a daze, wandering around the ship, not hearing anything anyone says to her. She cannot eat. Not that night and not in the morning. When Alistair tries to make her, she thinks of Jowan, so very long ago, after she had lost Neria. For all that she has gained since she left the Circle, she finds that losing someone she loves comes no easier. The difference between then and now is that there is something fierce and feral inside of her that was not there when Jowan led her to the dining hall and half fed her himself. When Alistair tries to coax her to eat, she hisses at him in a voice that anyone else might mistake for a sign of possession, “ _Don’t touch me_.”

So he doesn’t, but he doesn’t leave either. “Solona, you have to eat.”

She doesn’t say a word, but the bowl shatters in his hands, porridge splattering against the ship’s deck. She just goes on staring out at the sea.

She lets Effie comb her hair. Even when the girl goes on entirely too long after the knots are gone and she could have simply rebraided it, she lets her sister continue. It is the only comfort she will accept. Aside from this, her siblings stay back, unsure what to do with this sister nothing like the one who wrote them letters for years.

By dinner, Alistair’s concern is mounting. “Damn it, Solona, you _have_ to eat! Do you think Wynne would like this? Do you think she’d consider this a flattering tribute to her life? Solona, _look at me_.”

She should not have looked. When she does, the thread thin line she is balancing on breaks.

He sighs, a relieved sound. “Hey. There you are.”

 _No_ , she wants to say, but there are no more _no_ ’s left. She reaches out, hands clutching at his clothes. “Not in front of them. _Please_. Not in front of them.”

“Okay.” He places a hand on her head in a protective gesture as though he can shield her like this before helping her up. “Come on then.”

She lets him lift her to her feet and moves when he presses on the small of her back, everything in her focused on not screaming and crying, _not yet, not yet_. He leads her down to her cabin and when he puts a hand on the knob, she just shakes her head and says only, “Effie,” so he takes her to his own cabin instead.

When the door is shut behind them, he seems to brace himself. “Okay. Whatever you need to do, it’s okay.”

A few long moments pass in still silence and it’s only when he steps forward and his hands raise to her face, thumbs stroking over her cheeks, that she even realizes they are wet. “You don’t have to just take it all silently. Scream. Break things.” He glances around the bare room. “Er, not that there’s much to break. You can hit me if it’ll help. You don’t have to hold everything in and bear it on your own.”

On the deck, she was sure she would. She was sure she would scream until she was curled in a breathless ball. But now the place inside her screaming has suddenly fallen silent. As his thumbs pass over her cheeks again, gently wiping tears away, something else flares.

She thinks of Alistair speaking to the Antivan Knight-Commander. She thinks of running her fingers through his hair. She thinks a single word that she has not thought since Leliana gave her the terrible news. She thinks _yes_.

“Alistair.” The word is a whisper.

His hands fall, and he takes a step back. He looks shaken, guilty. “I didn’t mean--I know you--I’m sorry.”

It’s the guilt that makes her step forward so that there are only inches between them again--the guilt and the thing under and behind it: the want. She presses a hand over her heart. “I don’t want to feel this. Make me feel something else. Anything else.”

“I shouldn’t… I don’t want… take advantage…” He’s muttering now, flustered, skittish, but he hasn’t taken another step back.

“Maybe I’m the one taking advantage of you.” It’s true. Of course it is. But if she stops, if she steps back, all that will be there is Wynne’s loss.

“...You’ve always had all the advantages when it comes to me.”

She doesn’t know how to read his answer, can only guess that it’s some sort of approval or permission when his hand rises to her face again, fingers moving reverently over her skin.

Slowly, his forehead touches hers, and then his nose. For a moment he just nuzzles against her, and they breathe each other’s air in breaths that come harder and faster until she can’t stand it, the word, “ _Please_ ,” coming out in an involuntary whisper. He wraps his arms around her, pulling her in and up until their lips meet.

When her eager fingers have worked loose his shirt from his trousers and tugged it over his head, she recoils, and he just blinks at her with a sort of intoxicated confusion until he realizes what it is she’s recoiling from. With a muttered curse, he wraps a fist around the phylactery hanging from his neck.

“Shit. I’m sorry. I forgot--”

“Shh. It’s okay.” Pulling her own tunic off, her fingers curl around the pendant she always wears. For a long moment they just stare at each other without words before she finally reaches for him again.

In the way they touch each other is everything that’s gone unsaid. It’s sweet and gentle, fierce and fervored; in it is anger and forgiveness, hope and desperation, misery and bliss. It’s hours before she catches her breath.

She giggles sleepily, nothing in her thoughts but him: his touch, his taste. “Well, it’s good to know that even the fabled Warden stamina has its limits.”

She can feel him smile against her skin as he makes a negatory grunt. “I only need a minute.” His lips trail up her arm, over her shoulder, pausing at a scar there. “How did you get this one?”

She thinks for a moment. “The Mother. I froze one her her tentacles, and when it shattered, she decided the jagged end made a good knife.”

There’s a pause, the then he resumes the kissing, only stopping when he reaches the next scar. “This one?”

It goes on until he’s catalogued every scar on her body that wasn't there the last time they did this, and she knows what he’s doing. He’s calculating how many he could have prevented if he’d been with her. As though it’s his fault. As though he should bear any guilt for her decision.

When he’s finished with the scars on her body, he moves on the scar that runs across her left cheek, kissing it then rising up on his arms to hover over her.

Before he can ask, she mutters, “Armored ogre. Nasty fucker,” and then, finally, after having wanted to so many times and not being able, she raises a hand to his hair and trails her fingers through the golden locks. It’s soft. She looks at him thoughtfully, running her fingers through his hair once, twice, three times.

He gives a small, self-conscious laugh. “You hate it.”

She smiles at him, unaware of how wistful the expression is. “I don’t… I just…” She trails her fingers through one more time. “It’s so pointedly _King Maric_ . It’s not _Alistair_ . I don’t know what’s so wrong with _King Alistair_.”

His face falls, and she wonders if she should not have mentioned the thing that lies so heavily between them. The damage done, she cannot help but continue.

“Can you ever really forgive me?”

He lowers his head to lie beside hers, and they stare at each other from inches apart. “I never needed to _forgive_ you. Maker, a thousand times I wondered how you could have been so foolish, or so blind, or so… I don’t know. A lot of things. But never anything that needed to be forgiven. I know why you did what you did. You thought I was someone better than I was.” He snorts. “It’s not your fault I wasn’t who you believed I was. You did what you thought was best. I’ve struggled to be half what you thought I was. I’ve hated what you did. But I’ve never hated you. Maker, I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

She thinks of everything he deserves, of everything that he, living with the memory of her, has lived without. “Maybe you’d have been better off if you did.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He tugs until she’s on top of him, and reaches up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d let you make me miserable a thousand times if this is how it ends.”

Something cold and terrible settles low in her stomach.

She has been a fool.

She has been a bigger fool than she has ever been before.

Of course he would think this means something it cannot mean. And she has let him. She has led him by the hand into the belief that anything has changed, because she was selfish in her pain and weak against the temptation of him in the throes of it. She is sick with herself, and in that moment she only wants to get away from him before she has to tell him how wrong he is. She pulls away, climbs off of him, looking for her clothes, trying not to appear as frantic as she feels.

He rises up in the bed, looking at her in confusion. “Solona?”

“I--I should let everyone know I’m okay. I think I worried them.”

He hesitates. “Why do I feel like you’re running away from me?”

“No, I just--” And there it is. _No_. The only answer that can ever lie between them now.

She wants to crawl across the floor on her knees and beg forgiveness all over again. She wants to tell him that she never meant to hurt him. She never meant to hurt either of them. She wants to crawl across the floor and kiss him until he forgets the question he’s just asked. Solona Amell wants many things.

More than any of these things, enough that she would choose it at the cost of every other thing, she wants Alistair to be happy. Truly happy. Not just happier than she expected. Not just happy enough considering his circumstance.

She thinks of the day she walked away from him crying in the rain at the Vigil. It wasn’t enough. It felt like it would tear her apart, but it wasn’t nearly enough, because he has still loved her. And she has to make him stop.

She feels for a moment like _everything_ has led to this moment, every difficult lesson learned, every single thing that has made her harder and stronger. She isn't the girl who made him cry with the only cruelty she had in her anymore. She's capable of far, far worse. His tears are nothing but another regret if what she says this time isn't enough to tear herself out of his heart entirely.

When she gets back to the Vigil, the letter she’s been expecting should be there. Whatever it says, however little help it offers, she _will_ find the cure for the Calling. And when she finds it, she’ll be sure he’s done with her and ready to live a happy life with a pretty wife and pretty children.

No matter how much it kills her. No matter how much it hurts him. In the end, it will set him free to find the happiness they can’t ever have together because of a decision made by a naive seventeen-year-old girl who wanted the world to be good and fair, and foolishly believed it could be.

She closes her eyes for a moment. She cannot cry when she does this. It will ruin everything, and he’ll see through her. But she's changed. All the years without him and everything she's had to do and endure during them have created someone inside her that he will not even recognize. Every ounce of bitterness and resentment and disgust that have built within her over the years since she last tried to break his heart, every scrap is gathered.

She looks up coldly.

“Why are you so damned _needy_ , Alistair? I just wanted a bit of distraction. You did an admirable job and all, but you didn’t really think you were anything _other_ than a distraction, did you?”

He still looks simply confused. As though he hasn’t even comprehended the words out of her mouth.

Lies alone won’t do. She has to find the strands of truth and twist until they suit her needs. Her voice rises as she yanks her clothes on. “Maker, you’re just like everyone else! Everyone wants a piece of the Hero of Ferelden! _Everyone wants more from me than I have to give, and I’m sick of it_ . You have this stupid, selfish fucking dream of what staying a Warden would have been like, but you _have no idea_ . Do you know how many recruits I’ve watched gag and choke and die on the Vigil’s floors?! Do you know how many of my men and women have not come home from the missions that _I_ sent them on?! _I’m so tired of all the guilt and all the pain_ , and I am _done_ with you. I’m done with the pain _you_ cause _me_ , and I’m done being _coveted_ by you. _Maker_ , when we get off of this stupid ship I never want to see you again!”

Though it’s an action that hurts her as much as the words she’s forced herself to speak, she grabs the pendant from under her tunic and yanks at it so viciously that the clasp breaks. She flings it, watches it hit his chest and slide into his lap. When it leaves her fingers, it takes the last of her energy with it. Voice fallen to hardly audible, she mutters,  “Just fucking _stop_ , would you?” as she opens the cabin door and walks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I'm sorry. That last bit hurt me to write. On the bright side, we really are getting close to the happy ending! Honest!


	18. Though I Have Closed Myself As Fingers

Silently, in their cabin, Effie combs her hair.

She must know. Solona feels as though the whole world must know what she’s done.

“Why?”

The question is so quiet it would be easy to pretend she hasn’t heard it at all. Instead she knots her fist in the blanket on her bed and draws a deep breath.

“Once upon a time there was a girl who loved a boy. It was sweet and lovely. But she was a mage and he was a bastard prince, and he was a good man, and she was a naive fool. So he ended up in his castle, and she ended up in her keep, and it wasn’t sweet and it wasn’t lovely, but it was right. He brought peace and goodness with him everywhere he went, and she brought death into dark places. But the world was bigger and more complicated than the two of them, and it splintered and cracked, and good people died, and chaos replaced the order that, fearing its grip was slipping, had turned itself into a noose. And in the madness, our once sweet and lovely couple remembered a safe and still place in each other’s arms. It sounds like a happy ending to you, does it? Let me tell you the rest of the story. How one day the girl goes out to the market, and the mob descends, scared and angry. They take her head and put it on a pike, like a magic talisman to hold back all the chaos and madness that they don't know what else to do to hold back, and maybe that’s okay, because what does she need with her head when her heart is so full? But they parade it back and forth in front of the palace, level with the second and third floors, where our King can see what’s become of his mage, and when he comes out in his anger, maybe he kills a whole dozen of the mass waiting there for him. After all, he’s a Warden, and they’re only cityfolk who hardly know what they’re doing with the weapons they wield. But there are so many of them, and there’s only one of him, and in the end, our happy lovers do end up together, side by side, their heads at least, looking down from the gates that lead to the city. Is that the happy ending you’re looking for? Because that’s the only one they’ll get.

“And the woman who was once that girl cannot bear it. So she takes every horrible lesson she has learned, and every piece of darkness that’s swollen up inside her, and she says things that the sweet and lovely girl couldn’t have said. It isn’t sweet and it isn’t lovely, but she would make herself a thousand times uglier than she has to make things right. Because she has one chance left to find a happy ending for the one of them who was always the better and lovelier one, and she will scrape together every bit of darkness and bitterness and hardness inside of her to see it made so…

“I swear it. I’ll drag time out of the jaws of death itself to see him happy. I swear it.”

 

 

Ignatios approaches her with a worried face, holding out a parcel wrapped in silk. “He asked me to give this to you.” There is no explanation needed for who “he” is.

She tucks it into a pocket, the terrible weight of it, but she cannot bear to unwrap it. It’s only that night, long after Effie’s breath has evened into sleep, that she summons the courage. He’s included the chain he wore it on himself, and she fastens it around her neck with shaking fingers. The metal and glass are cold against her skin. Thinking what it is somehow makes it all the colder, and thinking where it’s been and where it will never be again makes it still yet worse. She wraps trembling fingers around her phylactery. _There._ Now no one is responsible for Solona Amell except herself.

When she can breath normally, she unfolds the note tucked in with her phylactery, hardly interested in what it can say when him returning this to her says everything, everything that it should, everything that she has encouraged him to. She tells herself it is not allowed to hurt, not when she has said the words to him that she has.

 _Solona,_  
_I wish I could say I’ve never wanted anything but your happiness, but that isn’t entirely so. I wanted you to be happy_ with me _._  
_I suppose I never realized that was anyone’s burden but my own._  
_I never meant to cause you pain. I’d rather be entirely forgotten by you than a source of pain to you.._  
_Begging your forgiveness,_  
_Alistair_

Her fist curls around the paper until it is balled up, a sharp point digging into her palm.

He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t defend himself. There are no tears or tantrums. He just… apologizes.

She clenches harder, one fist around the note, one around the sharpest edges of her phylactery, letting the metal bite so coldly into her skin.

She hates herself.

She hates herself for the things she’s said. She hates herself for the fact that, in the morning, while he quietly eats his breakfast as far from her as possible but refuses to disappear below deck, she will ignore him. She hates herself for the certainty that if his eyes should catch hers, she will turn away, as cold as the metal around her neck.

She cannot wait to return to the Vigil and be free from this ship. She is not so stupid as to think it will free her of her guilt. Only finding the cure and seeing Alistair happily married can do that now.

 

 

At the Vigil, Phoebe can’t stop laughing and won’t stop hugging them all in turns. “I painted your rooms! I did the ocean for Effie and a forest for Iggy and the night sky for Galen. If you don’t like it, we can do something different--”

Effie cuts her off, graceful fingers catching the hand that has been waving abstractly as she speaks and squeezing. “It will be wonderful, I’m sure. Only Galen will complain, and that only because he enjoys it and can’t help himself."

Phoebe just beams at them all for a moment. “So it was all fine? They just let you go? No problems?” She glances at Solona. “And you were good to Alistair?”

She tries to keep her face impassive. She has lied and lied well before. She lied to Alistair without blinking. But she finds that, when it comes to Phoebe, she cannot school her face into blankness.

Phoebe’s eyes narrow. “You _weren’t_ , were you? Well, what happened?”

She feels her face flush hotter and harder than she ever remembers. She cannot tell. She cannot tell Phoebe _that_.

She steels herself, straightens her spine to make the most of the last inch or two she has still over her sister in height. “He deserves to be happy. I told him what he needed to hear to be able to find his happiness.”

Her sister’s face twists into a look of utmost disgust. “Maker, but you talk a lot of _wank_ sometimes.”

 

 

In her room, she immediately begins sifting through the pile of mail, pulling the largest from it quickly, a thick bundle tied up with string.

Of course Zevran has not let her down.

She sits perched at the foot of the bed, still coated in dirt from the road, and reads.

Everything that happened to the Wardens who first encountered the Architect. What happened after to Fiona.

What she doesn’t expect is the account of Fiona’s pregnancy.

Male Wardens fathering children after their Joining is a rare enough thing that no one seems entirely certain it isn’t myth. But for a woman… Well, it is rare enough that the Wardens of Weisshaupt would not let Fiona leave until the child was born and proved normal. And by that time, what had been dismissed as absurdity in the first weeks after the Architect’s disappearance was undoubtedly true: she was no longer tainted.

The Wardens have done their best to include only fact, not speculation, and it is very little when it comes to Fiona. The conclusion is that the reversal of her taint is some inexplicable side effect of the acceleration caused by the Architect. There is no further insight.

She feels her heart drop.

She killed him. The Architect.

She killed the only chance she had at figuring this out.

She is devastated, but she goes on dwelling for days, trying to find some clue, some angle still worth pursuing.

She thinks too of the child. She wonders what became of him, of the boy who must have been Duncan’s son. After all, Duncan had stayed with Fiona during her pregnancy when she had been held at Weisshaupt. He had left only when she did, accompanying her back to Orlais, where she had returned to the Circle, and continued on to rejoin the Fereldan Wardens. But where had the child gone? It had not stayed at Weisshaupt. It had not gone to the Circle. If Duncan kept him with the Wardens, it is a story she’s never heard, and there are few of those left regarding the men lost at Ostagar.

She fits and refits the pieces in her head.

The child was born thirty-eight weeks after the incident in the Deep Roads. Little skill though she has at healing, years of study tell her that this is likely when the child was conceived.  It is not impossible that the father was another of the Wardens that accompanied them, though Duncan still seems the most likely.

And then it occurs to her. Rare though it is for a Warden to have a child, why should both parents have been Wardens? How likely is it, truly? Perhaps the one man who was not a Warden who made that trip was the father. Perhaps the man who was fond of serving girls was also fond of uncooperative elves. Perhaps--and really, given the likelihood of Warden conception, _probably_ \--Alistair has a brother.

It’s only when she realizes how few days lie between Alistair's birth and this potential brother’s that her blood runs cold.

Less than two weeks. And the woman would not even say, has never admitted that she had been pregnant, had discouraged Solona’s inquiries with a flat refusal to provide any relevant information.

Looking the papers over a last time, Solona throws them into the fire, hoping they are the only copies.

Maybe she’s jumping to conclusions.

Maybe she's simply thought about it all too much until the absurd seems possible.

Maybe it’s ridiculous.

But she has seen time and again, in Lothering, in the Brecillian Forest, in Orzammar, in Denerim, and so very many times since how the small-minded can be fierce and dangerous in their ignorance. The possibility that the mother of the King of Ferelden is an elf is a secret that could destroy a country, could cause a revolution and leave blood in the streets. _Alistair’s blood_. The suspicion, she swears to herself, will never pass her lips, and if she ever finds another clue that so much as hints at the possibility, she will not hesitate to destroy it too.

 

 

The letter that changes everything is found on the Vigil’s steps beside a dead darkspawn on a cold morning not long after her siblings have settled in. None of her Wardens claim the kill; none recognize the dagger in the creature’s heart. The envelope reads only, “Warden Commander Amell,” in large letters, so blocky and oddly angled the words are hardly recognizable. The letter is no easier to read. When she understands who has left it for her, she kneels beside the monster at her feet, the hurlock whose hand is clutched around the handle of the blade in his heart. She studies the face a long time, but there are no secrets revealed there, no traces of the magic the Architect worked so many years ago. No traces of the misery that has followed the creature everywhere he’s gone since the day she let him walk away from Amaranthine after delivering his master’s message, the day, he says in the letter that she doesn’t know how he learned to write, that she should have killed him.

She thinks how he reminded her of a shy Circle apprentice once. She thinks of the letter where he apologizes for having existed at all. It’s a story she knows too well. She thinks of innocence and guilt, fear and courage, shame and forgiveness. She doesn’t understand why everyone of them is a path that leads to the same place.

She doesn’t know what the expression on her face is, but the fact that not one Warden protests when she says they will burn the body with all the respect they’d pay one of their own tells her enough. She is tired. She is so very exhausted with how little is ever won by even the best of intentions.

It’s only later that she’s able to read the letter in its entirety, to understand what the creature who only ever wanted to do some good, who spread the Blight in his wake everywhere he went, who in the end knew better than Solona herself what it meant to poison everything he touched, has given to her. An echo in the collective darkspawn mind, too old, too quiet for even the most fluent Warden to decipher. In the west. A place that the Blight didn’t--couldn’t?--touch. He had wanted to go. But too many had died for his selfish desire to  _ live _ already. He would risk sacrificing no one else. Perhaps it would do her some good. She who had shown him kindness, though he had deserved none. He condemns her for it. He condemns himself, and he begs for her forgiveness. He offers her absolution with his own dagger. He offers her hope, if she dares take that double-edged sword that has cut her so many times before, in the west.

For Alistair, she will take it. If there is any possibility that the future she wants for him can be found there, then let it cut her. Let her bleed.  _ Please, Maker, let me find a way to give him the happiness he deserves _ .

  
  


It is surprisingly easy to leave. She kisses her siblings on their cheeks and knows they will be safe. They are with Carver and Nathaniel and Sigrun and Velanna and Oghren. They could be no safer.

Her directions are vague. Her faith is tenuous. It isn’t hope that carries her anymore, the way it carried a naive girl through a Blight. It’s sheer stubbornness.  _ That _ , fortunately, is something she has in ample enough quantities to carry her anywhere, no matter how far or how unknown.


	19. Unto Us From Heaven's Brink

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the long delay. The end of Solona's story is a little ways off still, but it's coming into sight, and I'm hoping to get this finished without having another eight month break spent curled in a fetal ball. To any of you still reading: you are a treasure. Thank you.

She marks the passage of time by the letters she receives. The first bears news so bad, it is a war with herself not to turn back. It is a terrible thing to discover that, there amongst her stubbornness, is still a thread of hope compelling her on.  _ When _ , she wonders as worry pulls her in the direction from which she’s come,  _ has all your hope ever done you any good _ ?

She follows it though. Despite the fear for those she has left behind, despite the dread that what she’s searching for doesn’t exist to be found, despite not knowing  _ where _ it is she’s following her hope to. She follows, and the letters find her.

 

 

***

 

Warden-Commander--

Solona.

This is not an easy letter to write. It is not easy news to give, and the song clouds everything. But I did not dare risk not telling you. After all, you must hear it too. We all are, you see. And if “all” meant only the circle, only Sigrun, Velanna, Oghren, and I, I might accept it. We Joined at the end of a Blight, soaked in the blood of our enemies as we pushed them back beneath the ground, and a Warden’s years are no guarantee at the best of times. But I mean, truly,  _ all _ of us. Even Albert and Farrah, the newest recruits you saw Joined just before you left, hear the Calling lulling them. I do not like to tell you; I know how it will worry you, but I could not risk that you not understand. I do not know what evil is at work here, but it is not the Calling. Your task is now, perhaps more than ever, of crucial importance. Do not abandon it. Close up your ears and carry on as you must, as must we all. Find what you seek, and come home.

May the Maker watch over you,

Warden-Lieutenant Nathaniel Howe, acting Warden-Commander of Ferelden

  
  


***

 

Solona,

Strictly speaking, I am meant to have no idea what it is that’s making the Wardens act like a bunch of templars who’ve just been told everyone is now a blood mage, but if I didn’t know any of the things I’m not  _ meant _ to know, I wouldn't know any of the good stuff at all. So don’t worry. I’ve sent word to him for you, letting him know it isn’t real and not to do anything foolish. Though, as you seem to have sole proprietorship of foolishness, you are the one I suppose I should be imploring not to be foolish. I miss you terribly, and I will be extremely cross if you don’t come home and make everything right eventually. The world seems to be going a bit mad without you.

Love,

Phoebe

(Galen, Effie, and Iggy send their love too. Carver does as well, though he is too tough and manly to use the word love and instead awkwardly muttered something about wishing you well, but it meant the same thing.)

  
  


***

 

Solona,

Nathaniel has tried to make people see reason, but the Orlesian Warden-Commander, Clarel, claims Weisshaupt has authorized her to seize control of the Fereldan Wardens. We don’t know what she’s planning but it’s some of that “anything to stop the Blight” tripe, and Nate’s having none of it. He’s organizing everything now--we’re leaving the Vigil with the Wardens who remain loyal. Our best bet is that whatever is causing the false Calling is coming from the Deep Roads, so we’re dropping your brothers and sisters off at Orzammar (Bhelen “would be honored to grant asylum to the family of his friend, the Hero of Ferelden.” Don’t worry, no one is going to be able to stop Velanna from explaining to him that “family” means something very different to you than it does to him--and as you can imagine, the constant song plaguing us all has left her an even more sparkling ray of sunlight than usual), and then we’re going to hunt down whatever this thing is.

Fight now, friend. Die later.

Sigrun

  
  


***

 

Cousin,

Carver tells me you are not hearing the false Calling where you are. So I send you what’s dearest to me in the world for safekeeping--my mabari, Kitten. Also, please care for the pestilent man accompanying her. For some inexplicable reason, I am, as you know, rather fond of him.

Love,

Marian

  
  


***

 

My dear friend, Solona,

Divine Justinia is dead. So many are dead, but Justinia…

Dorothea was the only person I trusted as I trust you. She was a beacon of light. And now she is dead, the Mage-Templar war cannot be averted, and I see no light.

The Right Hand seeks you. I have told her I do not know where you have disappeared to. I will not watch what happened to Dorothea happen to you. We must have someone to lead the Inquisition that we build on Dorothea’s orders, but it will not be you. You have faced death enough. And I no longer know who the Maker protects, but it is not those who deserve it most. So I will not let them have you.

Let no one extinguish your light, my friend. There is too little left in the world.

All the love I have left,

Leliana

 

***

 

Sister,

Orzammar is a strange place. I never thought to find myself in a land where magic is merely foreign, not feared. I performed one of First Enchanter Vivienne’s fire and ice dances for the Assembly, and they were more dazzled than the human nobles the dances were choreographed to entertain. Galen spends his time in the Shaperate, ever curious to know more of the wide world that he never thought to see. Phoebe has adopted a blind, elderly man. He is warrior class, though he asks bitterly how a feeble creature that can hardly hold a sword and can’t see to swing can be a warrior. She takes him with her when she draws. She says he’s teaching her to see the Stone. And Ignatios… well, Ignatios is most happily occupied. He visits Dust Town daily, despite that he always comes back lighter of pocket than when he left. He jokes that they’d steal the clasps from his robes if he took nothing else for them to rob him of, but I begin to suspect that the reason for his visits is a rather particularly lovely girl, and less about what she’s taken from his pockets than something else altogether she has stolen from him.

We are content here; you need not worry for us. But I do worry for the world above us. Can you see the terrible tear in the sky from where you are? Do demons plague you? I pray they do not. I pray you find what you seek. I pray you come home soon. We could do with a few more heroes. Above all, I pray you stay safe.

Love,

Effie

  
  


***

 

Warden-Commander Solona Amell,

I do not know if you have heard of the Inquisition. The organization did not form until after you had set out on your quest, so I do not imagine you have. Though there is rather a longer story to it, suffice it to say that the Divine is dead, the war between mages and templars has both raged and then been ended, and we now seek the creature responsible for the Divine’s death as well as for the Breach in the sky and the many rifts through which demons pour into our world. I seek your help because the creature is a darkspawn. He calls himself Corypheus and claims he is one of the ancient magisters who tore open the Veil and walked in the Fade. Until recently, he was held in a Warden prison. He is responsible for a terrible false Calling that has plagued the Wardens of Orlais and Ferelden. Any insight or knowledge you can provide us would be greatly appreciated.

Respectfully,

Inquisitor Evelyn Trevelyan

 

***

 

Solona,

The noise has stopped. Well, the song has stopped, and without it, Oghren is sleeping soundly. And by soundly, I mean he sounds like a bronto snoring and farting. I never would have thought I would find his noises peaceful, but compared to the last year…

The shemlen templar temper tantrum has ended. We go to collect your brothers and sisters. I assure you that if that slimy little ball of greed has harmed a single hair on any of their heads, I’ll bring roots cracking through his precious Stone to wrap around his treacherous throat.

Creators know what state the Vigil is in. We’ll probably be scrubbing the blood of overeager-to-die fools from the walls for weeks. I hardly see why you search so hard for a Cure when the Wardens have proven themselves so willing to throw their lives away. You should just return.

Velanna

 

***

 

My truest friend,

Once, I stood in a victorious dawn and looked empty-handed at all that had been sacrificed to bring the world the hope with which it faced the day.

Today, I stand in that brief respite of peace which comes when terror and darkness lie thwarted, and I find that hope is suddenly in my own hands. For too long hope, in short supply, has been hoarded, doled out stingily, a drop at a time, because those who held it did not understand that it is a spring that feeds itself. The more I give, the more I have to give.

Which is why I need you, my friend, who once had such hope. I have more than my hands can hold.

Come home, Solona. I am remaking the world, and I would have my first act as Divine be to return to you all that you have forfeit in the name of hope and beneficence. You will be a beacon in the world I am building, a symbol that the Maker’s favor extends to all those once subjugated and disregarded by the Chantry.

Do not mind the fancy title. For you, I will always be your faithful friend,

Leliana

 

***

 

 

Anders and Kitten are already emitting the rhythmic snuffles and snorts of sleep in his tent when she kneels in her own, hands trembling as she wraps first one and then the second glass vial in cloth, placing them in her pack alongside the letters that have found her, even in places where she herself hardly knew where she was.

She lets out a shaky laugh as her fingers brush the most recent, from Leliana. She is profoundly proud of her friend, filled with an aching longing for the world the woman wishes to turn this one into. But she is not so very sure she wants to be anyone’s symbol of anything.

What she  _ wants _ is the thing now so close, now that the cloth-covered bundles sit in her pack and she is prepared to head home. She wants to give back to the man from whom she has only ever taken. Life, time, a family,  _ happiness _ . It rises in her, bright, and joyful, and terrifying.  _ Hope _ .


	20. Nothing in Nature Now Remains Unblooded

Not far from Lake Celestine, Solona kisses Kitten’s head and waggles her ears and then stands and pulls Anders into a tight embrace. She doesn’t know how she would have survived the last two years without going mad if not for him, for his humor, though it’s quieter now than it once was. It’s a precious thing, the solace that two guilty consciences can find in one another. She holds on for a long time before finally releasing him, one hand rising to pat his bearded cheek. “Go get Marian and bring her back to the Vigil. ...Also, shave this… _thing_ off before you see her.” She gives a gentle tug on the scrappy beard he hasn’t bothered grooming. “Or at least tidy it up or something. It’s fucking awful, Anders.”

He runs his fingers through the hair and gives her an amused grin. “I rather like it. And I’m more concerned about the fact that I’ll be finding sand behind my ears and up my arse for the rest of the foreseeable future.” He grimaces and wags his head in a gesture that reminds her of Kitten, and sure enough a shower of sand shakes loose from him. When he reaches for her hand, his grip is firm and reassuring, and his expression is serious. “Good luck.”

His words are simple, but full of so much more than themselves. Because during their endless walking, during their sleepless nights under less and less familiar stars, she had told him things she’d never spoken aloud before. Because he knew what it was to grow up in and under the rules of the Circle, she had told him about stepping out into the sunlight and all the things that had dazzled her. Because he carried with him the burden of his own mistakes and sins made in the hope that the future might be better and brighter for them, she had told him what she’d done, young and so terribly stupid. Because he had betrayed someone he loved to do what he couldn’t convince himself wasn’t right, she had told him why she was on her mission and what she owed and to whom.

And now, with the pressure of his hand around hers, with the brief touch of his forehead against her own, he’s wishing her all the strength and courage and luck she will need. When he raises his head and straightens, he gives her a lopsided smile. “I’ll see you again soon.”

A part of her wants to watch the two of them until they’ve disappeared on the path northward, toward Weisshaupt and Marian, but she pushes herself on. Close now. She’s close. She has only to catch a boat in the fishing village up ahead, and it will carry her across Lake Celestine, down the river, across the Waking Sea, and around to Denerim. She adjusts the pack slung over her shoulder, gripping the strap tightly. Soon now, she’ll make things right.

 

Despite stopping at the Gnawed Noble to bathe and wash her clothes and scrub her armor, Solona sits perched at the edge of a crimson and gold brocade-covered chair feeling out of place, like the only thing needing to be tidied in the entire pristine sitting room where she’s been escorted to await His Majesty.

Fortunately, he doesn’t keep her waiting long. His face is entirely expressionless as he crosses the room and sits himself down across from her. It’s the composed face of a king. She knows him well enough to know it is a careful construct, but she can’t see through it, can’t guess how he feels about her showing up here, now, like this. A measured moment passes before he speaks.

“Solona. I’m glad to see you look well. It’s been some time since anyone has seen or heard from you. I’m pleased Thedas hasn’t lost one of its heroes.”

His bland formality stings, and she hates herself for that--for having the audacity to be pained that he has distanced himself from her after having pushed him away so hard as she did the last time they saw each other. She swallows it down and takes it for a good sign. All he needs now to find the happiness he deserves is the gift she’s brought for him.

At least he didn’t refer to her as Warden-Commander. She returns the favor. “Alistair.” She draws a slow breath, hands steady in her lap--she hasn’t had the kind of rigorous training and trial by fire that has taught him to give away nothing, but nearly a decade as Arlessa of Amaranthine has at least instilled in her a basic ability to hide her weaknesses. “I assume Phoebe told you what I was doing.”

“She did.” The change in expression is infinitesimal, a shift of his brow, a look in his eyes, but it’s enough for her to catch his curiosity.

She reaches into the purse at her belt and pulls from it the still carefully wrapped vial that all of her hopes are pinned on. She unwinds the cloth with fastidious fingers.

“I found it.”

This finally gets a reaction from him. He slides forward to the edge of his seat, eyes wide and brows raised. “Then you--” He pauses and tilts his head a degree. “You haven’t taken it. I can still feel you.”

She knows what he means perfectly well, knows he’s referring to the taint that reaches out from every creature that bears it and touches the others, but that isn’t the contact his words bring to mind.

She shoves the thought away. That isn’t what this is about. It’s about his happiness and a pretty wife who will love him and the pretty children they’ll have. She only has one part left to play.

She shrugs in response to his statement. “Not yet. But this one is for you.”

She holds the vial out to him, but instead of taking it, he leans back in his chair again, studying her before he speaks. “Why haven’t you taken it yet?”

“There are things I still need to do. I may have been gone for the last two years, but I _am_ still Warden-Commander of Ferelden. I have obligations to fulfill first.” If that isn’t the entire truth, it’s still true enough.

She has to wonder if he’s seen through her when his next question is, “When are you going to take it?”

She doesn’t hesitate--here, especially, there is no room for weakness. If he understands that there is only one other vial, that she intends to use it to try to deduce the draught’s components in only the _hope_ of recreating it, not even so much for herself as for the friends as close as family who will suffer without it—if he understands, he will not take this one. “I intend to take it before my Calling.”

“That’s a bit vague.” He raises a single unimpressed eyebrow.

She can’t help a swell of impatience that rushes over her. “I’ll take it when I’ve completed the tasks I have left. Is it really relevant?”

He’s quiet for another long moment. “No. It really isn’t.”

He’s still leaning back in the chair, and she doesn’t trust his answer, doesn’t trust at all that he’s suddenly going to make this as easy as it ought to be, but she extends the hand with the vial in it toward him anyway. “Good. Then take it.”

He doesn’t move. “It isn’t relevant because I’m not taking it.”

Without meaning to she rises from her seat. “What do you _mean_ , you’re not taking it?”

“The fake Calling made me do a lot of thinking. A lot of preparing. When I‘m gone, Fergus Cousland will inherit the throne. A significant portion of the preparation for the transfer of power is already in place. He was even so generous as to ask about some of the reforms I’ve made and assure me that they will continue in my memory. Of course he insisted on qualifying his statements with _if_ I die. The point is, I’m entirely prepared. I don’t _want_ your cure, Solona.”

She just stares at him. She can feel something hot and heavy moving through her, making her nostrils flare and her fingers tremble. “You just… You think you’re just going to saunter off to the Deep Roads and _die_ ? After _everything_ , after all this _misery,_ when you could finally have the life you _deserve_ and people who _love_ you and a _family_ , and--you’re just going to throw your hands in the air and say, ‘Fuck it’?”

“No. I’m going to say, ‘That’s it. I’ve done what I had to do. And that’s enough. I’m done.’ An entirely different ring to it, see? Though yours is catchier.” Not only is he entirely unmoved, he’s mocking her.

“ _Alistair._ That’s not--you can’t--you _can’t_. What about your people? What about your _duty_?” She’s spitting out anything now, reaching even though she couldn’t give less of a damn about the people of Ferelden or anybody’s duty, not any more, not when she’s already chosen those things over him once and watched him pay for her choice. She tries to slow her breathing from the speed it’s accelerated to with every word from her mouth. “ _Alistair._  Don’t you get it? What a cure means for you? You can _marry_. You can have _children_. I know you never wanted to be King, but even you must know you’ve turned out to be _good_ at it. You can do this and still be happy. You can have that--a life that makes you _happy._ All you have to do is _take this_.” She steps closer, holding the vial out again.

When his hand reaches toward hers, her tense shoulders lower with relief, but instead of taking what she offers, he wraps his hand around hers, shutting the vial into her palm.

“I had my happiness. I was happy as a Grey Warden. I was happy with _you_. Don’t ask me to give up the last piece I have left of the one thing that made me happy for _another_ future that I _don’t want._ ”

She wrenches her hand away while a loud, shrill noise fills her ears, and it’s only the sharpness in her throat that makes her realize the sound is her shrieking his name.

“You _never_ think you deserve _anything_ ! You’ve _never_ had _any_ idea how much happiness and love you have a _right to_. Maker, they’re _yours,_ you fool, and all you have to do is _accept_ it!”

She gets a reaction out of him finally, though it isn’t the one she wants. He stands and wraps his arms around her, and she can’t stand it, because she’s _quivering_ with the feeling filling her up and all his embrace is doing is pushing the weight of it harder down on her.

He rests his cheek against her hair and says soothingly, “It’s okay. It’s going to be alright.”

She thinks suddenly of the things that pressed her forward further and further west when all she knew was that she wasn’t willing to return without the thing now in her hand. She thinks of Alistair’s face when a casteless baby in Orzammar’s Dust Town had wrapped his hand, so tiny and pale by comparison, around Alistair’s finger. She thinks of children with dark blond hair running through the Palace gardens. She thinks of a voice whispering in Alistair’s ear, “ _I love you_ ,” and she doesn’t even care that it isn’t hers so long as he gets to hear it.

She tears herself away from him, her voice rising to practically a scream. “It’s _not_ okay! It’s _not_! I won’t _let_ you just die!”

“You don’t get a choice this time.” His words aren’t resentful or angry. They’re _gentle,_  and that is _worse._  He smiles at her, and she hates it.

And she _can’t_. She can’t let him throw his life away, throw himself away, not when there’s still happiness for him.

“ _Please._ What do you want me to do? Just… _please_.” She pulls the stopper from the vial despite the fact that the liquid is precious and must not spill, and she holds it out yet again, praying he will take it from her trembling fingers.

Instead he takes her braid in his hand, stroking over the twists, as though this is a compromise between his desire to touch and comfort her and the way she keeps pulling away. “Nothing so terribly impossible. Nothing you haven’t already done. I want you to say goodbye.”

Her hands clench, and it takes all her will to keep the one on the open vial gentle, but her heart is pounding and her head is somehow frantic and empty all at once, and her hold on her magic is fraying as her other hand squeezes the glass stopper tighter and tighter until it shatters in her fist. When the answer comes to her from a book she'd only thought she had read to learn to defend against the things it contains, she cannot hear any remonstrations against it in the silent chaos of her mind.

No matter how long it’s been since he used his templar abilities, he has the training, and if he had understood what she was doing when she took his hand and pressed the vial into it, she would not have managed.

But he has no idea. He cannot guess, because he trusts her. She knows that, before this, he wouldn’t have believed her capable of betraying him the way she does when, as her bloody fist crushes the broken glass in her grip, his hand raises to his mouth and his lips open, and there’s surprise in his eyes before his head tilts back and he swallows the contents of the vial.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry. But I won’t let you die.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting to the climax of the story at this point (the denouement is long, so there's still a little ways to go), so... yeah. Solona is kind of hitting rock bottom here.


	21. Wrought For Us All For Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oceans of gratitude to nanahuatli for being a wonderful beta, and also to celeritassagittae for all the feedback, idea-bouncing, and especially for all the enthusiasm. Also to all of you who read and comment—you are my number one source of delight, and I mean that more as a statement of how much joy you bring me than how little delight I’m feeling with things at the moment! Thank you all!

_What have I done_ _?_

It’s the one thought that comes clearly, without swirling through the fog her mind is still in.

The last hours keep flashing past her in shattered images and impressions.

Alistair’s eyes closing and his body slumping so unexpectedly that she’d barely managed to catch him.

Him lying there on the plush carpet as red as the blood dripping from her fist. _This isn’t right; this isn’t how it’s supposed to work_.

The dread that filled her when she squeezed his limp hand and he didn’t squeeze back; the terrible courage it had taken to rest her fingers on his lips, and how many times she’d had to feel his warm, steady breath blow over them before she had accepted that he wasn’t _dying_. (It was a ghastly thought that had not occurred to her, the idea that, like its monstrous counterpart, this solution might cull as well as cure.) He had, mercifully, breathed, and breathed, and breathed.

But he had not woken.

When Anders, without her approval, had taken it upon himself to prove that what they had found at the end of their long journey was truly what she had sought--an act she understood as his way of putting the judgment for his crimes in the hands of fate, all too troublingly willing to accept a guilty verdict--it had not been like this. He’d been tired, so very tired, but he’d made his way into his bedroll of his own volition, and when her worry had overcome her and she’d shaken his shoulder, he’d blinked at her groggily until she pushed his hair back from his face and whispered, “Shh. Go back to sleep. I was only checking.”

No matter how she’d shaken Alistair, he would not wake. It was her screaming at him that had brought the guards. Drawn faces and shocked eyes and hushed voices that meant nothing because Alistair would not wake.

One of them had put his hands on her. He’d gone skidding across the ice suddenly crystallizing across the floor when she’d shoved him with hands and magic both, and for a while there was just Alistair’s steady breathing and her begging him to wake.

And then there was pain and pressure, and she was being suffocated worse than hands could ever manage. Her vision had gone dark around the edges, and before it even cleared she was being hauled away, nothing to resist with but tired muscles straining against the hands pulling at her and her feet scrabbling at the ground.

A Holy Smite. Someone had dared use a _Holy Smite_ on _her_ , the Warden-Commander, the Hero of Ferelden, and they were dragging her away from _Alistair_ , who _would not wake_.

And all she had been able to do was scream, wordless, like the mad, like a beast.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been shut in this room now, waiting for the madness to dissipate. When she asks herself again, _What have I done_ , she is not sure she wants the fog of panic and confusion and fear to part at all. She does not want to face the ruin of her own making that will be exposed when it is gone.

But the delirium only keeps her company for so long. Eventually she is left with only sobriety, her forehead resting against the wooden door that, along with her clarity, she’s gained enough mana to unlock if she wished.

There’s no point though. Because her spinning mind has sifted out for her the reason that, where Anders never fell, Alistair cannot rise. With no denizen of the Fade within him to navigate the way out, he is trapped there. And she has nothing like enough lyrium with her to enter and retrieve him herself. So she waits, thinking to herself again and again, _What have I done?_

Finally, days or maybe only hours later, voices approach.

“Your Ladyship, do you think it wise--”

“I think it _necessary_ to speak with her. Tell your ex-templar to make his preparations, and open the door.”

Solona feels the results of the templar’s efforts, a thickening of the Veil, a sense of heaviness within her, but for a moment she just wants to laugh at the sheer irony of exactly who it is that’s come to judge her. When the door opens, she expects a look of gloating triumph on the face of the woman standing in the hallway before her, a look that says, “ _Oh, how the mighty have fallen…_ ”

But Teyrna Anora Mac Tir’s tense frown is inscrutable.

“Warden-Commander. You’ll excuse me for foregoing the formalities, but as no one seems to have any idea what’s going on here--though I have heard some…” her eyes slide to the man beside her coolly and then back, “ _nimble_ theories--perhaps you could offer _your_ explanation?”

Solona doesn’t trust it for an instant, this suggestion that the woman whose father she saw beheaded and whose plans she thwarted will just take her word over that of the man in the armored uniform who she assumes is the Captain of the King’s Guard, though he’s not the same man she once argued with over who would accompany her on her journey to Vigil’s Keep.

What she ends up saying, though, _is_ the truth, if not all of it, not the part she hardly knows how to admit to herself. She keeps the explanation as simple and brief as she can, divulging no secrets.  “There are… drawbacks to being a Grey Warden. The past two years I’ve been seeking out something that would remove that which makes Wardens what we are from the blood. I found it. I brought it here, for the King. There was… an unforeseen complication. I need to retrieve him from the Fade, and to do that I’m going to need lyrium. A _lot_ of lyrium.”

Anora just studies her, her own face revealing nothing. “That’s quite a different story than, ‘A suspiciously bleeding mage was found screaming incomprehensibly over the unconscious body of the King.’ Perhaps offering that version of events to begin with would have prevented some of the assumptions that have been reached. Unfortunately, without that possibility presented, the guards have done exactly as they would be expected to in such a circumstance.” She tilts her head and gestures back into the room behind Solona. “Let’s speak privately for a moment, Warden-Commander, shall we?”

“Your Ladysh--”

Anora holds up a hand to cut off the protesting Guard Captain, gives him a single silencing look, and walks past Solona into the room.

Inside, she turns and waits expectantly until Solona closes the door. “I don’t believe you would intentionally harm the King. While it is fortunate that I was in Denerim at all, _unfortunately_ I was neither the first nor the only person informed that a bleeding mage was found out of her right mind over the unconscious body of the King.”

Solona feels a wariness raise within herself. She does not know what Anora’s intentions are, but she doesn’t doubt the woman’s ability to outmaneuver her when it comes to political pull.

“I don’t think you’re quite aware of the situation you are in.” Though mild, her expression is not unconcerned. Solona still finds it all too easy to read a threat into the woman’s words. “I’m sure you’re aware of some of the policies implemented by the New Divine. What you may not be aware of is how very fiercely some of the population is resisting these changes. Alistair, Fergus, and I have been working to contain and control the more… _active_ members of the resistance, not only because Alistair has made it quite clear that he is in favor of these policies and we agree, but because to oppose the Divine is to draw the ire of the Chantry down on Ferelden. I— _we—_ would not see our country suffer because of those who cannot let go of old prejudices. However several Banns have been offering funding and support to the resistance, and they will not hesitate to use any situation that might raise negative sentiment for mages to their advantage.” She levels a look at Solona, her expression austere. “You will not be the only one to suffer if the King does not wake to put the rumors that are surely already spreading to rest.”

For all the distrust she’s ever had in Anora, Solona has never doubted that the woman had meant it when she said she’d only wanted what was best for Ferelden—they’d had different ideas of what _was_ best, and of who exactly was encompassed by the idea of _Ferelden_ , but she had not doubted that Anora’s actions had been the ones she _believed_ to benefit Ferelden most. And now she is saying that what is best for Ferelden is that Solona not be found guilty of blood magic.

 _And yet she_ is. Her stomach turns at the thought, so distressing she feels physically ill. Ejecting the contents of her stomach will not reject the truth of what she has done, so she does the thing she has spent her life perfecting and pushes it down to be dealt with another time. Along with it, she pushes down any concern for what will happen, not just to herself, if Alistair chooses to tell the truth when he wakes. When she speaks again the same words she’d spoken earlier, her voice is as calm and certain as the Teyrna’s. “I’m going to need lyrium. A _lot_ of lyrium.”

  


It isn’t hard to find him. Amidst the grey-green nothing of the Fade stands a single tavern, the lane up to it lined with clay pits flickering with welcoming orange-flamed fire.

Inside, a half dozen patrons mill about. The barkeep is drying a wooden mug with a towel that has certainly seen cleaner days.

If it were a specific tavern, a place she could name, it would concern her less. But it is a hundred nameless taverns across Ferelden rolled into one, an imaginary composite, and what worries her about this is how it is constructed with such detail that she knows this is a place where he has spent a great deal of time, a place he’s willed into imagined existence consciously, not just wandered into in sleep. A favorite daydream. She thinks of him sitting in some meeting even more dull and disinteresting than the worst of the ones she is subjected to as Amaranthine’s Arlessa, tuning out the wheedling voices, turning himself inward to this place.

He isn’t in the common area before her, so she makes her way up the narrow staircase that leads to the rooms above.

There’s sound coming from one, a noise familiar enough for her to name it without seeing. The clatter of a sword hitting the floor when the belt it’s fastened to is loosened. A laugh-- _his_.

It catches her by surprise. She doesn’t know anymore what she might have expected his fantasy to be--not, surely, anything to do with her, not since she’s turned the idea of touching her again into just another opportunity to break his heart. Alistair in a remote cabin with just his dogs, maybe. That sounds like a place he’d retreat to in his mind. And it wouldn’t have caught her like a punch in the stomach like this.

She knocks. Listens to the muffled noises. Listens to him laugh again, before calling out a clear dismissal: “We, uh, have everything we need; thanks.”

She can’t speak, can’t think of anything _to_ say--not, surely, because she’s wondering who it is he’s in there with. It’s a rather clandestine meeting place for the King of Ferelden--but that, perhaps, is the point. The King ditching his responsibilities and running off for an afternoon with a kitchen girl or some merchant’s daughter--it’s a fair enough fantasy, she supposes. _Good for him_ , she thinks hollowly. Not that this scenario has even been confirmed, but she’s already thinking how, if he’s going to be thinking about running off to fuck women in vaguely dirty taverns, it would do him more good to fantasize about a woman he might actually marry, the daughter of some arl or Marcher lord, given that, like it or not, such are the only choices he has. If she’s bitter, it’s surely directed at herself for the fact that this is yet another choice she has taken away from him.

Finally, unable to summon words, she just knocks again.

“Ah, look, this--isn’t a good time. We’re--” he laughs again, and it is the first time in her life that she has ever hated the sound, “we’re _occupied_.”

She expects the door to be locked. Not that she couldn’t unlock it, even more easily here where the world is eager as a mabari to bend to her will than in the waking world. But she doesn’t expect it to just open before her when she tries the handle, doesn’t expect to suddenly be confronted with the sight before her. Him in Warden armor, back to her, oblivious to her intrusion, as he kisses the woman perched at the edge of the table in front of him with abandon. A pair of leather leggings discarded on the ground at his feet. The knee he pushes outward from his hip to reveal a pale thigh, his golden skin dark in contrast before his hand disappears _there_.

And then there’s a gasp, hands pushing his to less inappropriate places as wide eyes peer around him in shock.

She had thought the idea of him in here with another woman was a punch in the gut. She was wrong. That was a friendly jab. The punch that takes her breath away is this: after everything, it is _still_ _her_. That he is a Warden here doesn’t really surprise her; perhaps she ought to have guessed that herself, that he doesn’t just imagine running away from his duties for an afternoon but rather he imagines never having had them thrust upon him at all. That in this place he was never anyone’s King. But _this_ , that after every time she’s failed him, after every way in which she’s hurt him, _it’s still her_ \--it comes with a shame so bitter she barely knows how to swallow it down.

“Alistair… _Alistair!_ ” There’s a note of panic in the voice of the dream-Solona that stares at her, and she braces herself as he turns, readies herself for his confusion, his suspicion, tries to prepare something to say to convince him that she’s the real one, not the thing in front of him.

But he just gives her a steady look before his jaw clenches and he looks away from her with something she can only half-interpret: disgust, or anger, or frustration.

The Solona that he turns back to, suddenly tender and comforting, is not, she notices, exactly her, not as she is now. It’s Solona as she was, face unscarred, something bright and innocent in her eyes despite the anxiety of the situation, and for an instant as he stands protectively in front of the girl she once was, brushing her hair soothingly back from her face, for an instant she thinks, _Maker, yes, protect her—please don’t let her become_ me _._

“It’s okay. It’s going to be fine. I’ll get rid of her. Don’t worry.” His voice is full of gentle reassurance. He kisses her forehead before he spins on his heel and marches out of the room, catching the real Solona by the upper arm and dragging her roughly along with him into the hallway.

That look is on his face again when he drops her arm and faces her, arms crossing over his chest.

She’s still trying to understand what it is that he thinks is going on when he finally speaks.

“Go home, Solona.”

His words only throw her off all the further. “Alistair? Listen to me. I need you to listen. You’re in the Fade.”

“I know damned well where I am! I know where I am, I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and for once in your fucking life, you’re going to let me make my choice myself! Go. The. Fuck. Home.”

She doesn’t know if it’s a flinch or a recoil, but her back hits the wall, the hallway too narrow to allow her to be pushed anywhere near as far away as his words have thrown her. If this were a real tavern, no matter what he were doing in it, no matter what it cost her or anyone else, she would turn and walk away. Because he’s right. Beyond anything she can defend herself against, beyond the reach of any apology she can make. But what he’s asking…Her voice is high and quiet and tight, both genuinely grasping for understanding and incredulously appalled. “You think I should just leave you stuck in a dream in the Fade? That I should let you stay here and watch your body wither and _die_? You honestly think that I _should_ or _can_ do that?”

“Quite honestly, I’m not sure how much of a damn I give about what you should or can do; I’m telling you what you’re _going_ to do.”

It’s a terrible thing, what she realizes as she stands there staring at him. That everything she wanted for him had so much less to do with _him_ at all than with _her_. All this time she’s been holding on to her guilt as a way of holding it at bay, and it stuns her what a selfish creature she has become in the years between herself and the girl Alistair still dreams about who only wanted to watch the sunset turn the world bright and gold and beautiful. For so long now she’s only thought of his unhappiness through the filter of _her_ guilt and _her_ shame. The more he forgave her for her part in his unhappiness, the harder she’d clung. The happiness she’d wanted for him hadn’t been about _him_. It had been her absolution. And only now that she sees this does she truly see _him._

“I’m sorry. I’m _so, so_ sorry, and that isn’t good enough, and I have no right, and all I’ve ever done is ask things of you that I _shouldn’t_ have, but I’m _begging_ you: don’t ask me _this._ ”

He says nothing, just stares at her, angry and unwavering.

“I was… wrong doesn’t begin to cover it. I know. Maker, it’s your life and of course you should get to choose how to live it, but _this_ _isn’t life, Alistair._ ”

He finally shrugs at that. “The Blight, starving to death while I dream about—while I dream; what’s the difference? I planned my exit. I can’t see that it really matters so much _how_ I take it.”

There are words on her tongue, and she hates them, hates the way they will manipulate him, hates that she has put herself in a place where they are true, and she isn’t even positive they will work now, after all she has done, truly angry at her as he is, but they are the only ones she has left. “Your guards think I locked you in the Fade on purpose. I was… a little hysterical when they found me. And still bleeding. Anora,” she laughs bitterly, “Anora got me the lyrium to wake you so that you can put to rest the suspicion that I used blood magic on you.” She tries to laugh again, but that doesn’t really describe the sound that comes out of her. She leans back against the wall and brings her hands to her head.

“Maker, what have I done?”

His expression doesn’t soften. “I’ve asked myself the same thing.”

“Alistair… I will take whatever you think I deserve, I’ll do whatever you ask, but if you don’t wake _other, innocent_ _mages_ will suffer because people will use _my_ actions against them. I’m not asking you to save _me_ —I’ll _let_ them make me Tranquil and I won’t let Leliana stop them if that’s what you want—but Anora is worried that the people who’ve been resisting you will use this if you don’t wake to stop them.”

The disgust in his face intensifies. “You think I want you made _Tranquil_?!”

She lets her hands fall from her temples. “I don’t know _what_ you want. Which is part of how we ended up here.” There’s no self-pity in her level voice. “I promise, I won’t presume to know what you want or what’s best for you again. What I’m saying is that the consequences for _me_ , for what I’ve done are _your choice_ , because that’s the only one I can still give you. I _can’t leave you here_ , Alistair.”

“I don’t want you _Tranquil_! I don’t _ever_ want that!” He steps closer, one hand slapping onto the wall beside her. “I want you to _swear_ to me that you’ll _never_ use blood magic again, no matter what, whether I wake or not!”

“You don’t have to ask that. I—I _know_ I fucked up, Alistair. I swear I won’t—I won’t _ever_ use blood magic again. I didn’t—I shouldn’t—”She lets out an aggrieved sound. “I won’t. I swear.”

She makes herself hold his gaze for as long as he keeps it, serious and searching, even though her shame makes her want to turn away. Finally he nods silently and steps back.

She hesitates a long moment before asking, “You’ll come back then?”

She can see on his face the struggle between his concern and his resentment, and she knows the moment he makes his decision even before he speaks his words of defeat.

“Fuck you, Solona Amell.”


	22. What Each Breath Meant

It would be a lie to say it costs her nothing to hold her tongue. When the immediate commotion of his waking has died down and Alistair has taken the first opportunity to drag her to an unoccupied room, she expects a sentence for the crime that he has, mercifully for all the innocent mages who might have suffered for it, decided to keep between them.

When he turns to her, the mask finally slipped to reveal the anger still there underneath, and asks, “Just so I know before you go,  _ why? _ ” grinding the word out, she has no answer for him.

What good would it do to tell him she cares more than she ought, more than allowed, more than she has any right to? Would it even matter to him now when, after everything, after all the times she’s caused him pain, after all the times she’s kept him from what he wanted, it would appear she’s finally gone too far?

Maybe it isn’t easy to say nothing, to offer no defense for herself, but it would be harder to give an honest answer.

Looking away, she studies the desk behind him. It’s cluttered, but there’s an ordered chaos to it that was never there in how he tossed things haphazardly into his pack years ago, always having to dig down to the bottom for anything he looked for later.

It occurs to her suddenly that the last time she was in this room, he was trying to apologize for saving her life and for what he had done to manage it. The ten years that have passed since that day do little in the moment to dull the ache of remembering how he had cried then, for what he and Morrigan had done, for what he and Solona had lost.

He deserves more than her silence. However hard it is, however much more than saying nothing it costs her.

“I wanted you to be happy. What I did, the choice  _ I _ made--I didn’t know. I thought you could do it. I didn’t--I knew it would cost you  _ something _ , but I didn’t think that after all this time it would still make you so unhappy you’d  _ want to die _ .”

He has the look of a man who has braced himself for whatever she had to say, arms crossed and body tense, but her words surprise him anyway. He melts a little, slouching down against the desk in a way that reminds her cruelly of their last encounter here.

“I didn’t…” He shakes his head, tries again. “I never said I  _ wanted to die _ . I mean, that’s a bit extreme.”

“You weren’t going to take the cure.... Alistair, I don’t know what to call that other than that you’d rather die than keep doing this.”

He stays against the desk, but his arms cross again, and he lets out a derisive snort. “Isn’t it funny? There was a time when you were  _ the only person who ever really listened to me _ . And now people spend entirely too much time hanging on to my every word, and you don’t hear a single one without interpreting it wrong. That’s  _ not what I meant _ . That’s not what the choice was to me.”

He makes a noise of frustration, hands scrubbing over his face. “You didn’t hear the False Calling where you were, did you?” He waits until she shakes her head. “And that’s one thing, what you were doing. It was for the Wardens. Do you have any idea what it was like, to sit here and go about business as usual--or well, business as usual plus an ancient evil magister trying to destroy the world plus archdemons screeching in my head--while I had no idea what the Order was doing and could be no part of it? Whatever Corypheus was, he was at least part darkspawn, and that should have been on  _ us _ . The Wardens. If I had been there when you weren’t, maybe I could have changed something. I could have spoken against it, the things they did! But I didn’t even know. Because I don’t get invited to club meetings anymore. I sure as Andraste’s charred ass had the nightmares and the headaches and the  _ noise in my head _ , but I didn’t get to know anything, to be part of anything, to  _ do anything _ . It’s not the part I would have chosen, the Calling, but it’s  _ all of being a Warden I had left _ . It wasn’t a choice between living and dying, Solona. It was between being a Warden and not being one. I didn’t get to choose  _ how _ , or  _ who it even meant anything to other than myself _ , but I thought I could still choose  _ if I was one or not _ .”

For all the times she’s been wrong, she thinks that this one is the first that’s made her terribly, desperately grateful to not have been right. And yet, glad as she is that he isn’t just so miserable he’d rather die than go on, if she had done nothing, the difference would have been… semantics. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand what it meant to you. I’m sorry for every choice I’ve ever taken away from you. And I’m sorry about  _ how _ \--about  _ what _ \--about the  _ way I stopped you _ . But I’m not sorry I didn’t let you choose to die. I’m not.”

He doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, and he flounders for a moment before he latches on to the one thing he does know how he feels about. “ _ Blood magic _ , Solona?  _ You  _ and _ the Wardens _ ?!” He shakes his head, a terrible grimace on his face.

He’s wrong if he thinks she doesn’t understand him or anything he says anymore, because she understands this perfectly. Both herself and the entire Order, they have  _ disappointed  _ him.

“...I can’t answer for the other Wardens. I wasn’t here, as I should have been. But I’ll accept whatever censure or sanction you choose for my own guilt.”

He studies her, brows furrowed, eyes intense. “You’ve never used blood magic  _ before _ that?”

“No.”

“You’ll never use it again.”

“No.”

“That wasn’t a question.” He goes on staring a long time before he speaks again, expression unchanged. “You can leave.”

She blinks once, twice. “...I should… do  _ something.  _ Make amends or ...I mean, there are consequences—”

“I forgive you. You can leave. Go back to Vigil’s Keep. Just  _ go _ .”

It isn’t forgiveness that’s in his voice though. He doesn’t say it, but just below his words she swears she can hear,  _ “I don’t want to see you anymore.” _

  
  


When she reaches the Vigil, her family is already back, arrived only days ahead of her, and it isn’t until her arms are wrapped around Phoebe, her face buried in her sister’s hair, that she truly feels like she’s  _ home _ . When she releases her, Ignatios pushes forward a young dwarven woman with fair hair and a look of star-struck awe clear as the casteless mark on her pretty face. It’s a familiar expression, though Solona thinks it’s been years now since she’s seen this look directed at herself.

“This is Sassa.” He grins, terribly pleased with himself. “My  _ wife _ .”

The girl speaks rapidly, almost tripping over her words. “I remember you--when you came through Dust Town.  _ You _ wouldn’t remember--I just sort of followed you around from a distance. But I got my first dagger off a Carta member you killed. A year later a man tried to rape me, and I stabbed him in the throat with it. So you kind of saved my life. Sort of. I always kind of thought of it that way. I mean, it was kind of a thing. A lot of Duster kids had stories about how you saved them. They were mostly bronto shit though. I always kind of thought my story was at least a bit more legitimate.” 

“Um.” Solona struggles for a moment to find an appropriate response. “Well. It sounds like you saved yourself to me.”

“Oh! I mean, yeah. I guess so.” Sassa’s mouth twists into a lopsided smile as she turns to Ignatios. “You were right. I do like her.”

It’s only later, in Amaranthine, when Solona sees the suspicion and mistrust that the girl treats most strangers with, that she understands what an exception this greeting is and just how much the brash enthusiasm Sassa doesn’t hold back around her husband’s brother and sisters means. Maybe the protective fondness she comes to feel is a little misplaced on someone so capable of taking such vicious glee in violence, but she’s  _ family _ , and like every member of this one, that’s something she grew up without and never expected to find. If there’s one thing the Amells know, it’s what family is worth.

  
  


The keep is a mess. It would seem that after the Wardens abandoned it, bandits had taken over. In the places where blood has to be scrubbed out of the stones, she wonders whether it was the bandits or the beginning of the atrocities the Wardens committed against their own, thinking they could stop future Blights. She scours harder, almost glad not to know.

A summons arrives from Weisshaupt, and she makes a sound of disgust as she passes it around the dozen Wardens who have returned to her. When Oghren tosses it into the fire rather than to the next man, there are no objections. No one makes any attempt to prepare for travel.

Between the state of the keep, the demands of an arling that has made do with an acting-arl with little real authority for months, and all the other mundane necessities of settling in somewhere, it’s weeks before she’s able to gather everyone, family and Wardens, in the council chamber.

Galen holds the last remaining vial of cure, uncorked as he sniffs at the liquid within. “I have a few ideas, but I won’t be able to do this alone.”

“I know. I’ve thought about it. I’m going to do some… recruiting.”

Nathaniel’s brow wrinkles disapprovingly. “You aren’t going to try to Join everyone you want working on this? ‘Welcome to the Wardens, and by the way if you don’t want to die you’ll need to figure out what the ingredients in this are?’”

“No. Maker, no. Not recruiting to the Wardens. I’m going to put together a team.” She nods toward her brother. “Galen, obviously. Sassa, I know your specialty is poison not restoratives, but you know dwarven ingredients. I was hoping you’d help.”

By way of an answer, the dwarf reaches out to dab a finger against the stopper and brings it to her lips. “Hmm. No mushrooms, no mold. There’s lyrium in there, I’m pretty sure? Maybe… blood? Lyrium and blood are hard to distinguish...”

Solona feels her fingers tighten on the edge of the table she’s gripping. “Perhaps you could  _ not _ just taste the potion that could affect non-Wardens in ways we can’t even begin to guess?”

She shrugs. “Not sure how you want me to help without tasting it, but okay.”

“But you’re right about the lyrium. Which is why I want Dagna, if we can poach her away from the Inquisition. There’s a Tranquil Effie knows whom we should be able to pick up at Skyhold as well. And I want to have a chat with Frederic of Serault about dragon blood while I’m there. Well, I really want Dagna to chat with him about it, but we’ll see. And there are a few others who should already be heading to Soldier's Peak.”

She doesn’t mention that, if the woman hasn’t already disappeared again, she intends to ask Morrigan to stop by Soldier’s Peak and take a look as well. The woman probably already knew more otherwise lost arcane knowledge than anyone when they traveled together during the Blight and has by no accounts given up the pursuit of more, but Solona is afraid if she mentions the woman at all, they will see through her, see that what she wants, more even than she wants either to get the woman’s opinion on the cure or to see her old friend, is to meet the boy Leliana mentioned in her letters.

Thinking about Kieran is the closest she’s come to thinking about Alistair since she returned to the Vigil. It isn’t like all those years ago when she pretended not to think of him, when she told herself again and again she didn’t have the time. She’s seen now what dragging her guilt and her shame around with her have done, and it’s nothing good. He’s well. He’s safe. It’s enough. There’s nothing more she can do. There is, finally, nothing more he  _ wants _ from her. And somehow it is easier to live with the idea that he hates her than it ever was to live with the knowledge that he still loved her.

And if her curiosity about the boy is more than it should be--well, it’s a small thing, and though she won’t admit it out loud, she’ll allow herself this.

She thinks of the boy, but she doesn’t think of Alistair. She thinks of her family, and she thinks of her Wardens, and she thinks of their cure. On the Vigil’s battlements before she leaves for her brief visit to Skyhold, she watches the sun set, as brilliant and golden-red as it ever has been, and she remembers when this was all she wanted, to watch this again and again and again. She hadn’t realized before how the desperate guilt she’d carried with her so long had bled the color out of everything, but when Phoebe looks up from her sketch to smile, the sun flaring around her, it’s  _ brilliant _ .


	23. And Yet You Set the Word Upon Me

It’s a strange thing to trudge out of the snow and icy winds, across the bridge, and through the gates of Skyhold. If it weren’t for this strangeness, for the wildflowers growing around the edges of everything and the gentleness of the breeze and the warmth in the beams of sunlight, she might not have even noticed it, the  _ power _ here, the magic that is so old and still and quiet and at home in the stones and the earth that even a mage might move amongst it oblivious.

A Tranquil that she can only assume is the one Effie recommended meets her at the stables. “My Lady. Enchanter Euphemia stated that you would prefer to arrive unannounced, so I have been unable to secure a room for you. I would recommend presenting yourself to Ambassador Montilyet. I am sure she will see to your accommodations.”

Solona has had little chance to get used to the detached mannerisms of the Tranquil, and even now, after so many years and so many ways she’s changed since then, it brings to mind the pain and betrayal she’d felt just after her Harrowing, when she’d discovered that the best friend she’d believed dead, the girl who had been as close as a sister in those childhood years in the Circle when she’d had no other family, hadn’t died when she failed her Harrowing. She cannot help that she finds the mark stamped on the woman’s face obscene as a curse, that her uninflected, toneless voice chills her, but Effie had called her a friend. Solona isn’t sure the level of bond that denotes is something a Tranquil is capable of, but she had not been so rude as to suggest it. She has never learned how to be comfortable around a Tranquil, but she has learned well enough how to hide her discomfort.

“You must be Amara. I’m pleased to meet you. Effie says that you work lyrium the way that artists work pigment.”

“I have never worked with pigment, but I do not believe it has much in common with the process of working with lyrium.”

“Ah.” Solona shifts, perhaps not hiding her discomfort quite as well as she’d like. “She meant rather, I think, that your mastery of lyrium work is so fine as to be an art itself.”

“I have read many treatises on the subject, and I have many years experience with the application of lyrium in both enchantment and potion making. I hope that my knowledge will be of use to you. It would please me to assist Enchanter Euphemia.”

Solona still isn’t sure this is enough to be considered an indicator of friendship, but it’s something, surely. “We’re both very grateful for that. Thank you.”

“You are welcome. Follow me. I will take you to Ambassador Montilyet.”

There’s a sense of the place as an ancient ruin that remains, despite the wealth tactically displayed. Part of the battlements over the stables has crumbled away, and other places appear recently rebuilt, the color of the stone not not quite matching the age and weathered appearance of that around it, but the stables are full of well-bred horses with gleaming manes, and there are Inquisition banners everywhere, richly dyed silk finely embroidered with the organization’s symbol, the joined Chantry Sunburst and Sword of Mercy. When Amara leads her up the stairs to the entrance, the massive doors thrown wide open to welcome guests and the breeze that smells of fresh grass, there’s no mistaking that the hall inside is designed to impress. The cathedral windows at the end are set with brightly colored glass also bearing the Inquisition’s symbol and casting prisms of color around the room, onto the stone floor and the velvet curtains that hang down from the distant ceiling to brush against it. Pointy-beaked birds tall as three men cast in burnished bronze flank the throne, and a second set lear down where the Inquisition’s prisoners must stand to be judged. Amara holds open a door in the shadow of one of this second set for her.

Though the chair the woman is seated in probably costs as much as any piece of decor in the Vigil’s throne room, the ambassador’s office feels less ostentatious. There are exposed beams, and between the happily crackling flames in the fire place and the dozens of candles lining the room, there’s a warmth and brightness to the space. And to the woman, once Amara has introduced her.

“I do wish you had sent word so that we might have welcomed you properly!” One hand is sifting through a stack of papers while the other gestures at the dwarf attending her. “Gemma, track down the Inquisitor, please. And if you see one of the chambermaids, tell them to prepare one of the rooms that overlooks the garden.”

“Really, there’s no need to fuss yourself, Ambassador.”

“Ah, but Josie’s primary mode of interaction is fussing. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she couldn’t fuss over you.”

Solona turns at the voice, a smile already sweeping over her face.

It’s a strange sight to behold Leliana in the robes of the Divine, though she holds the absurd headdress in her hands, presumably because it would not have fit through the door frame. It is not a strange enough sight to keep Solona from rushing forward, arms wrapping tightly around the woman’s shoulders the moment she’s within reach.

Lithe as she’s always been, Solona thinks she’s lost weight, hard and bony in her arms, though there’s no lack of strength when she returns the hug.

“I have missed you terribly. I’ve been here expecting you for days, you know. I was beginning to contemplate the possibility that my information was not entirely correct.”

Solona can’t help laughing as they finally part. “I see that your duties as Divine haven’t kept you from knowing more about the comings and goings of others than many know about themselves.”

Leliana leans in, hands moving to smooth Solona’s travel-mussed hair. “The power of the Divine is titular. The only real power is knowledge. And the changes I’m making require no small amount of power to bring about.”

“No, I don’t imagine  _ anyone but you _ wields the kind of  _ power  _ necessary for what you want to bring about.” Though her voice is wry when she replies, there’s only admiration and affection on Solona’s face.

Leliana just makes a wordless humming noise, a perfectly innocent smile on her face as she gracefully changes the subject. “Evelyn will be delighted to meet you. I gather you are something of a personal idol of hers.”

  
  
  


The Inquisitor is… not what she expects. Two or three times over. First as the creature that presents herself, head half shaved and face tattooed in a way that mightn’t be out of place on a Dalish or a Chasind but seems a little outlandish for a Circle mage who was born a Marcher noble, and then again with the poise and punctiliousness she commands despite her appearance. If there’s anything about her starstruck by Solona, she doesn’t show it.

When Solona explains in vague detail the reason for her visit, the woman is gracious enough accompany her to the undercroft and encourage Dagna to take her up on her offer.

Dagna hardly looks at the Inquisitor before returning her gaze to Solona as she bounces on her toes.

“Isn’t it funny how things line up and come around full circle sometimes? All I wanted in the world was to study the things that, without your help, I never could have. And now I get to do the things I love,  _ and _ it will help you?! I’d work on something like this even if it  _ wasn’t  _ for you, but for  _ you _ , Warden-Commander? I’d have done things I don’t even like for you.”

The Inquisitor’s voice is faintly regretful when she says, “Do consider coming back when the task is completed. You’ll always be welcome here.” A conspiratorial smile twists at her mouth as she leans in and says in a false whisper, “We can afford all the best toys for you to play with, you know.”

  
  


“Warden-Commander—might I have a moment?”

The man striding towards her halts when he reaches her, his voice determined when he speaks again. “I owe you an apology. The last time we spoke…”

Despite his words, the man is no more than vaguely familiar. Judging by the accent, homegrown Ferelden, her guess is he’s the Bann of one of the smaller bannorns, not one administered by Amaranthine, but apparently someone she’s met once or twice.

“I, uh, said things to you that were… inappropriate.”

It’s the “uh” that sparks her memory, though it’s plain enough that the man’s discomfort now is born of guilt and shame rather than the tongue-tied flusterment that had tangled his speech so many years ago in the halls of Kinloch Hold.

“Ser Cullen.”

“No!” He looks downright startled at that. “Not Ser, not anymore. I left the Order. Well, there isn’t an Order anymore, but I left it before there wasn’t one.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t begin to know what else to say.

“I’m sorry; I’m sure you’re busy, and I don’t intend to keep you, but I have owed you an apology. I’m sorry for the things I said to you that day. You didn’t deserve either my…” He fidgets nervously, eyes on his hands, unable to meet her eye. “... _ impropriety _ ... or my cruelty.”

For a moment her mind is simply blank, and it takes a breath to recall the girl she was all those years ago and how his words had hurt her, long left behind as the feelings are. What remains with her is not that hurt when she thinks of the day she returned to the Circle. It’s all the death and the fear and the pain. Friends dead and faces she’d known transformed into monsters. Finally she shakes her head. “ _ I’m _ sorry. For what happened. To you. To everyone in the Fereldan Circle.”

“It doesn’t excuse my words or my behavior.” There’s a calmness to his voice of a man who has accepted his failures. He does not allow her to excuse him, but he does not ply her with regret, and she wonders if it took him as long as it has taken her to learn to live with the mistakes he has made.

“I forgive you.”

And at that he looks as unsure how to respond as she had felt before.

It’s only when someone at the end of the corridor calls out, “Commander!” and they both turn that the silence between them breaks.

“Ah, I do believe that’s actually me,” he says, gesturing sheepishly to the soldier who had called out. “Thank you for allowing me a moment of your time. And for your generosity. Warden-Commander.”

  
  


She finds herself entering the library just as the sun slips low enough to be level with the windows, pouring its light in heavy golden beams through the leaded panes with such intensity it’s hard to make out anything that doesn’t lie within the shards of illumination.

“Warden-Commander?”

She swallows a sigh. The only person with an Orlesian accent this thick that she has any desire to speak to is currently attending to a few of her obligations as Divine and won’t be meeting her until the evening. She’d hoped she might find a bit of peace from the people to whom she is either a curiosity or a potential pawn in the Great Game here until then, and she isn’t well pleased to have stumbled across one more person who wants something of her.

Blinking against the light, all she can make out is dark hair and pointed ears. “Yes?”

“We’ve exchanged letters, but we haven’t yet been introduced. I’m Fiona.”

Given how the last letter Solona had from the Grand Enchanter—former Grand Enchanter now, she supposed—had been so dismissive, Solona isn’t sure what to think of the woman approaching her now.

“Oh. Yes. Pleased to meet you.”

“I understand you’ve been away for some years and you’ve just returned to Ferelden?”

As Solona’s vision adjusts, the woman comes into focus, her dark eyes studying Solona intently. “And did you find what you were seeking?”

Solona can only assume that the woman is well aware of  _ what  _ she had been seeking, given her repeated requests for the details of how Fiona had come to find herself unTainted, but there’s more interest in the outcome of her search than she can account for from a woman long cured already. The wild fear that had prompted her to toss the records stolen from Weisshaupt recounting the time after the woman’s cure comes back to her. Unlikely as it is that the child the woman bore really was Alistair, she finds herself wanting to know what the woman’s investment in the issue is, and while she’d prefer to keep what knowledge she has close and give away little, she understands that to get more from Fiona she will have to give in turn.

“I did, as it happens.”

Fiona’s brows rise only slightly. “Perhaps I of all should not be surprised. There was no Blight when I was a Warden, but even I am aware that the one who slays an archdemon does not live. And yet  _ you _ do.”

A tension wells in Solona as she wonders if they have come upon a secret the woman might find worthy of trade. “Maybe it was a miracle. Maybe it was something else. Maybe if you were to provide me with the information I asked once of you, I’d have more to say on the subject.”

The woman pulls away slightly, back straightening and body going stiff. “I told you all there was to tell. It is an anomaly of how the Architect’s magic affected me. If I knew more, I would happily share it.”

Solona’s head tilts as she plays the best card she has, the one most likely to elicit a reaction if the possibility she’s probing is an actuality. “I gave it to him, you know. Alistair. The cure. It didn’t come with any recipe or instructions, which is why I’m here, looking for those who can help me work that out. But he’ll live. Whether the cure can be reconstructed or not. He’s hale and whole, and he will live.”

She looks away from Solona’s prying eyes, a fraction of the tension in her leaving in an open-mouthed exhalation. “That… is good. His father would be pleased.”

Fiona’s words are hardly damning or transparent, and yet she feels a sudden, stunning certainty. She feels it in the space inside that had whispered to her to trust a bruised and bleeding elven assassin at her feet and let him live though there was no reason for the trust, the place from which the feeling had come that had risen the hairs on the back of her neck when Teyrn Loghain laid out the army’s plans at Ostagar.

“Is his mother?”

Fiona plays it well, Solona must give her credit for that, though her voice is a little too cold when she replies, “I was under the impression the woman had died bearing him, though you know the King a great deal better than I, Warden-Commander.  _ I _ have never met the man and was only passingly acquainted with his father. You’re far more likely to be able to answer that question than myself.”

Solona finds herself angry.  _ Furious _ , even, indignant and outraged. If the bitter tang of hypocrisy taints her fury, it only fuels her anger. That she has been guilty herself of taking his choices from him, of abandoning him in the hopes of keeping him safe, inspires no sympathy.

“Let's take a walk on the battlements, shall we? The sun’s nearly set and we’ll have such a lovely view.” She ignores the woman’s resistance, hauling her forward by her arm easily, short and slender as the elf is.

Outside, her view across the fortress clear and no one near to overhear, she releases Fiona with a shove, her anger doubling, tripling, tripping over itself. It’s a struggle not to shout, to keep her voice to a vicious hiss. “ _ How could you _ ? He was a  _ baby _ ! How could you  _ just throw him away _ ? You gave him to  _ Eamon _ ! To  _ Eamon, for fuck’s sake _ !” She stomps closer, towering over the elf. “He made him  _ sleep in the stables _ . Did you know? Did you  _ know _ that he was  _ treated like a dog _ ?”

Fiona cringes and then slowly draws herself up to her full height, and though she’s still a whole head shorter than Solona it does not detract from her aplomb. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

There’s guilt in her eyes though, not that Solona needs it now. She makes disgusted scoff. “Oh? So who was  _ your _ son’s father then? And what happened to  _ him _ ?”

She’s calculating, Solona can tell. What lie will hold enough truth to put her off?  _ None _ , Solona thinks.

“Maric was my son’s father, yes. But the boy died.” Her chin rises. “The First Warden told you about this?”

Solona ignores the attempt to change to subject. “Don’t think that  _ I _ of all people don’t understand. Don’t think that  _ I _ don’t know what it is to want to protect someone you love from--fuck, from  _ everything your love is _ \--dangerous and difficult and--” She reaches for the battlement wall, holding onto it with desperation as she forces a slow breath. “One thing is certainly true. He deserves better than  _ either of us _ . But what does he  _ get  _ for that? Nothing and no one.”

When she finally turns to the other woman, she’s staring hard at the horizon. There’s a terrible darkness on her face when her gazes moves slowly to meet Solona’s. “He slept in the stables? Truly? The Arl  _ put him in the stables _ ?”

Eamon is lucky, she thinks in that moment, that he is on the other side of the country safe behind castle walls.

“Did you think they only treated elves and mages so? Did you think if you cut him free of that, of  _ you _ , he’d live like the prince he was? Or does it even matter? Do you still think that  _ your love _ would have been worse for him to bear than no love at all?”

“ _ Like a dog. _ ” Fiona’s voice is soft but as cold as the Frostback winds outside of Skyhold’s magic. “Does he know?”

“No. I wasn’t sure before. And I was as stupid as you.”

“You love him.”

Solona tilts her head back to, eyes moving over the stars growing slowly brighter as the last of the day’s light fades away. She has to swallow before she can force herself to answer. “I did once. It hardly matters anymore now, but  _ you’re his mother _ . I’m not saying you should be  _ publicly _ named the Queen Mother, but he deserves to know.”

“What good could come of it? I won’t put him in danger.”

“What good could come of it?!” Solona repeats the question with disgust, as though it isn’t something she’s asked herself a thousand times. “ _ It doesn’t matter _ . What good, what harm--you picked once, and  _ you picked wrong _ . He  _ deserves _ to know. Let  _ him  _ decide what to do with the knowledge.”

The moment that Solona understands that the person she’s angriest with is  _ herself _ , her rage gives way, leaving her only very, very tired. She makes a gesture like shaking water off her hands and turns away, hardly even talking to Fiona anymore. “Whatever. You’ll do what  _ you _ think is best, never mind what he would want, and you’ll tell yourself he’s better off and that your conscience is clear because of it. Maker knows no one can  _ make _ you see it differently.” Without excusing herself, she leaves.


	24. Unwind the Winding Path

Traveling to Soldier’s Peak with Dagna along turns out to be an unexpected delight. All that vivacity, curiosity, and enthusiasm that had still been budding a decade ago when she and her band of unlikely heroes had escorted the girl to Kinloch Hold has come to a full bloom in the intervening years. As the foothills at the base of the coastal mountains begin to give way to steeper slopes, they come to a sharp descent before the path angles upward into the mountains proper. Dagna looks up at her with a sparkle in her eyes, only half hiding a daredevil grin. “You should frost the path, and we should slide down.”

It’s foolish and absurd and the slope is just steep and long enough to be a little dangerous--Solona’s mouth hangs open for a moment, ready to voice any or all of these things, until she can’t keep an answering smile from tugging it closed. It is, perhaps, all of those things, but as it happens it’s also _fun_ . Lying on her back at the bottom, staring up at the clear blue sky above and laughing, she feels for a moment as young as she had been the last time she traveled with the dwarf--as young, and _far_ more carefree, with no archdemon bearing down on the world, making whispered threats inside her head while civil war threatened outside. It’s a peace she’s appreciated too rarely, but she embraces it all the harder now for it. When she rises even Amara, sitting with a straight-backed formality at odds with the fact that she’s on her butt in the dirt, is wearing a slightly wide eyed expression that, on her otherwise impassive countenance, looks a little like _mirth_.

At the fortress, she lingers outside, catching up with Levi while her companions are settled in. “People arriving for days, there ‘ave been. I don’t know what’s amiss, my lady, but if I can be of help, you’ve only to say the word.”

She smiles, claps a hand on his shoulder. “I do appreciate that, Levi. I won’t be overseeing everything myself, but I imagine you’ll be needed to acquire some things.”

He nods very seriously. “The Dalish girl, wot with the big eyes like a deer caught unawares, ‘as already given me a list of alchemical ingredients to see to.” He shifts, glancing around surreptitiously before speaking. “You’d think after so many years ‘ere with Avernus I’d not be able to ‘ave my fevers ruffled by much, and I wouldn’t say it with,” he glances around again, his voice lower when he resumes, “‘is mother about, but _‘at_ one over ‘ere… Well, he’s a bit of an odd one, inn’he?”

She follows his pointed glance to a young boy sitting cross legged on the ground, his head following the side-to-side tilt of the raven on the stump in front of him. She observes the boy with mild curiosity until something inside of her drops. She can’t say what gives it away: his chin, his nose, the way his dark hair falls over his forehead.

Morrigan had left weeks before she’d arrived at Skyhold, the ambassador had informed her regretfully. Leliana had offered to ensure a letter reached the woman if she wished to write one, but she had brushed it aside, insisted she’d only wanted a passing opinion and that wouldn’t be necessary.

She doesn’t know where they went after or how long it’s been since they arrived here--not long, surely, if Leliana hadn’t yet been aware--but she’s certain that the boy is Morrigan’s.

 _And Alistair’s_ , something inside her whispers, but as she moves toward the child without even intending to, she can see nothing about him that declares this.

Until he looks up at her and smiles. She wonders if anyone else would see and recognize what she does in the way his face arranges itself, unexpectedly open. “You’re mother’s friend.”

She pauses, as though, despite his calm, she might startle him away like the raven that takes wing when she speaks. “I am. How did you know that?”

“I used to dream about you. It was very loud, but you made it quiet. I don’t remember why I didn’t want you to. It was much nicer.”

Something inside her clenches impossibly tight at his words, and she doesn’t know if it is in pain or relief. Her voice sounds high to her own ears when she speaks. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen your mother. How is she?”

His face falls, his brows drawing together. “She’s worried. Because she swallowed the voices. She doesn’t want me to know, but I could hear them before Grandmother came and took the dreams and the sounds away.”

“Kieran, what did we say when we talked about answering peoples’ questions?”

She knows the voice even if she hasn’t ever heard it speak with such gentleness. Her eyes meet the luminous yellow-gold of Morrigan’s as the boy answers, “That I should ask them questions back instead of answering. But she’s your friend, mother, and she was the one who made it quiet in the loud, bad dreams. I can answer her.”

The witch’s hand moves to the boy’s head, fingers ruffling through his hair. “The world is not always as you believe you’ve seen it. Have a care.” She hands her son a roll of bread  and watches as he scurries off to find more ravens, pinching off pieces and tossing them in the air. Her gaze stays on the child when she finally speaks. “And so you see, he is no monster. He has a kindness in him that is entirely his own--“ there’s a huff that’s not quite a laugh, “he couldn't possibly have learned it from me.”

“He’s…” Solona isn’t sure what to say. She doesn’t think ‘odd’ would please the witch. “... _gentle_ .” She thinks of the boy’s words about his grandmother, of letters from Leliana that had told her things that had raised the hair at the back of her neck and hadn’t seemed possible. ”We _did_ kill Flemeth, you know.. I watched her _die_.”

Morrigan’s mouth thins though her expression gives away little. “I was not surprised. ‘Twas the reason I had kept him hidden before.” She finally turns to Solona. “After all I had done to get hold of the Old God’s soul, when she came for him all I cared about was that she had come for _my son_. And then all she did was take Urthemiel from him. She could have done as she pleased with me. She could have made me grovel at her feet. She could have poured herself out into my body until there was nothing of myself left. Not that I could have stopped her, but I’d have let it happen so long as she left him be. But she just took the soul, told me I had understood nothing, and left. And now I am less certain of her than I ever was.”

Despite the years and never-fully-resolved discord between them, Solona reaches for the woman’s hand and squeezes. “You could come back to the Vigil with me. Even a mad, ageless swamp witch-goddess would be hard pressed to break through me and my Wardens to get to you.”

Morrigan chuckles. “The little bird has grown talons.” Instead of pulling her hand away as Solona expects, she squeezes back. ”I have never _cowered_ . I will not begin now. If _Kieran_ were in danger…” She shakes her head. “I do not know what she intends, but she means _him_ no harm. I will face her as I must. And until then, I will try to find a way to free myself of my… _indenturement_ to her.”

 

While Morrigan spends much of the two days they remain at Soldier’s Peak in Avernus’s laboratory with the team Solona has put together of alchemists, enchanters, bloodmages, assassins, arcanists, and anyone else who might possibly be able to offer assistance in reconstructing the potion provided them, Solona spends time with Kieran. Every time he gives her his guileless smile, something inside of her aches to know that Alistair will never see the boy smile at him like this. It aches harder still when makes herself think the words she knows she has avoided: _his son_ . For all the years it’s taken her to learn, instead of pushing it down inside, she unclenches like a fist and let’s the ache ebb. It is what it is; Alistair is safe, and the child is not _unhappy_.

He’s a strange, thoughtful boy. The only times he doesn’t seem to be avidly observing everything around him are when she catches a sort of confused, wistful look on his face. When she asks him what’s wrong, he says only, “I can’t remember.”

For all his odd words, he is in many ways like any other child. He squeals and laughs when they play a game of hiding and she finds him under the desk that once belonged to Sophia Dryden, pulling him out and tickling as she declares, “I got you!”

During another game, she finds a little carved warrior statuette under a bed, and she forgets she’s supposed to be looking for the boy, overwhelmed by memories as she is. A decade disappears, and she’s somewhere on the road outside Haven again, telling Alistair she has something for him while he misunderstands and thinks she means a kiss. She’s under a grim grey sky, waiting until their lips are only inches away to hold the statuette up between them, laughing when he fails to notice and kisses it instead. She’s watching that surprised delight spread over his face as he realizes she means an actual gift. In Soldier’s Peak on a different day, in what feels like another _life_ , she sucks in a breath and remembers how, after he’d admired his gift, he _had_ kissed her, breathless and still a little uncertain. And she remembers, months after, him grumbling in his room at Redcliffe Castle about how he couldn’t find the figure as he dug through his pack.

When Kieran calls out, “Aunt Solona?” and she wonders what it was that Morrigan said to the boy to make him think of her like that, she nearly does cry, eyes rolling up at the ceiling as she blinks the tears back. She sits the statuette on the floor and uses her magic to make it jab and parry its way across the floor to Kieran while he claps.

Once she would have found these memories vicious in their cruelty, but as Kieran’s face arranges itself in a look of amusement so familiar to her, she finds that the thing holding her heart so tightly is fangless, no more bitter than it is sweet.

When the little warrior reaches him, Kieran picks it up and brings it back to her, but she just shakes her head. “I believe that he would like very much to for you to keep him.”

 

On they day they depart, on the steps of the fortress, Dagna presents the boy with another present, a metal figure in a shape Solona can only describe as roughly like a seashell.

“It’s very shiny. Thank you.”

Dagna just laughs. “It’s not for looking at! It’s for _listening to_!”

He holds it his ear a long moment before his face lights up. “It’s the sound lyrium makes! I can’t hear it again!” He holds it immediately up to his mother, and Morrigan listens thoughtfully.

“At last, I see what you mean. A clever contraption, arcanist.”

Dagna gives a cheeky smile. “It was inspired by Kieran and Cole. Everyone talks about the Blight like a song that calls to the darkspawn, but the two of them were always saying how lyrium has a song too. It gave me ideas. I want to test some things out, but I need to be able to hear what they were talking about to do it. And now that I’ve finally got it working, well, after… You know, since… I mean, I thought he might like to hear it again. And after all, I wouldn’t have thought to make it if not for him.”

He doesn’t seem aware of Dagna’s awkward dancing around the topic of what he’s lost at all as he cradles the metal shell against his ear. “It makes me feel less lonely.”

Solona travels with the two out of the mountains, and at the base, when Morrigan and Kieran turn to head toward Gwaren and on to Solona knows-not-where while she returns to the Vigil, she presses a palm to the boy’s cheek. “It’s okay to remember some things. And it’s okay to forget some too.”

Morrigan hugs her tighter than she expects, murmuring quietly when her lips are at her ear, “He knows how to get to Vigil’s Keep on his own. I taught him that long ago, though I had not asked you. Should he ever arrive, you will look after him?”

Solona’s mouth opens and then closes again before she manages, “I would, you know I would, but--”

“‘Tis enough. I told you to live gloriously once, my friend, but I think you have had enough of glory. I tell you now instead, live _joyously_. That, I think, is something you’ve allowed yourself less of than, after everything, you are entitled to.”

 

Weeks pass, and though she receives letters from Galen consistently, and they often offer some new insight, the cure remains unduplicated.

When Ignatios and Sassa return, her first thought is that they’ve come to deliver the news of success in person, but Sassa is all apologies.

“I would have stayed! I wasn’t tasting _the cure_ anymore, I was only compar--”

“She was only tasting _all kinds of potential poisons_ ,” Ignatios interrupts, tone full of dry humor. “I hear that perfectly normal, healthy children are difficult enough; no mutant half-darkspawn babies for me, thank you.”

It takes her a moment to make sense of his words. “Oh. Oh!” Solona can hardly decide whom to hug first. “Oh, Maker, that’s wonderful!”

The smile Sassa gives her is pale and so strained it’s nearly a grimace, but the hand that moves seemingly unconsciously to her still-soft stomach is gentle and protective. She has little to say.

It’s days later that Solona finds her alone in the yard with one of the practice targets, a half dozen blades embedded to the hilt at the center.

“I never thought I’d have children. I mean, I certainly wasn’t going to have a casteless child, and I wasn’t going to whore myself out to have some noble’s brat. I don’t really remember my mother much, but I knew enough to know that, for a Duster, a baby is always just a _thing_. It’s another burden keeping you down or it’s how you buy your way up, a _transaction_. And I knew I didn’t want _any_ of _that_.” She glares at the target, sends another blade flying. “I never thought I’d feel about _anything_ the way I do about Iggy. I never thought _anyone_ would _love_ _me_ at all, much less the _way he does_. And he brought me up here, and everything was just… _good_. And why wouldn’t I have a baby here, with him? If I didn’t feel like I belonged, well, I was just adjusting, right? It was good. It was all so good, and it would be fine.” Another blade flies, even harder.

“I thought it would be fine, but all the sudden it’s _real_ , and I don’t _belong_ , not _really_ , and I _never will_ , and I don’t know _anything_ about how to _do any of this_.”

“Oh, Sassa…” Solona checks the urge to reach for the dwarf while the touch is so clearly unwelcome, tense and closed-off as her body language is. “Do you really think _any of us_ don’t feel that way? Maybe the Circle isn’t much like Dust Town, but the Chantry made sure it was a place where we knew we were never meant to be loved. Do you think we, any of us, don’t know how scary it is to let that happen, to _let someone love us_ , when we were told so long that _wasn’t for us_ ? How scary it is to think that _we_ don’t know how to love someone _right_ or _enough_ ? Sassa, I can’t imagine anyone _belonging_ in this family _more_ than you do.”

Sassa snorts. Her voice is brittle when she speaks. “Oh, come on. _You_ aren’t _scared_ of anything.”

“Ha!” The noise that comes out of her is sudden and incredulous, loud enough to echo. “You have _no idea_ . The things that _have scared_ me. The things that _still terrify me_.” She gestures to Sassa to hand her one of the knives. “But you know that the best way to deal with fear is?” She throws, manages to hit the target, if decidedly farther from the center than Sassa’s knives have hit. “With a great big,’Fuck you.’ And what better way to say it to everyone who ever made you feel small and ill equipped to love and be loved than by going ahead and doing it anyway, ill equipped or not?”

Sassa frowns, lines up another knife, and throws. “Fuck you, Karshol.” Another. “Fuck you,  Lollinar Ivo.” Another. The list grows. When she runs out of knives, she turns to Solona, eyes still narrowed though the frown has faded, replaced by the faintest hint of a smile, and nods. “Yeah. All right. Fuck ‘em.”

Solona laughs, finally allowing herself to reach out for a brief, one-armed hug. “Not even fear can stand against your stubbornness--if _that’s_ not an Amell for you, I don’t know what is.”

 

Another month passes. And another. When she begins to doubt that those working on it  will ever manage to recreate the cure, it’s only with a sort of calm regret. She’s been a Warden longer than any under her command. She’s felt the press of the horde physically, on skin covered in darkspawn blood. There’s a peace in the knowledge that if the Taint can’t be held back from devouring people she cares for, _she_ won’t be there to watch it.

Another month passes, and when the letter from Galen comes, saying _not yet, but close, so close_ , she realizes she’s afraid. Not that they _won’t_ figure it out. Rather that they _will_.

By the time the final letter comes, with vial wrapper securely inside, she’s made peace with this too. She puts the vial away in a drawer full of things from another time, things not meant for _now_ . When the Calling comes, _then_ she’ll give up the life she’s made for herself, the rhythms and routines that held her life together when the center could not hold. But for now… for now she is Warden-Commander Amell, and it is the only thing she knows how to be.

When Galen, finally returned from Soldier’s Peak, asks her why she hasn’t taken the cure yet, she just says, “Not yet.”

When he shakes head, grips her arm, tells her that he cannot guarantee even this cure will work if she waits too long, if the Taint has progressed too far, she looks across the room at Sassa, one hand rubbing circles on her slowly swelling belly as she laughs. There’s a time for facing fear, and a time for defiance, and a time for letting go. Like everything else she’s laid down and left behind, there will come a time to let go of her title and her duties too. “Soon. But not yet.”


End file.
